The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Operational decision · 2023–2025
A streamer's sanitary-pad brand outsold Sofy — then buyers found black matter inside
Mianmian de Yang sold the trust a streamer built, on pads it never made. In April 2025 buyers found black foreign matter inside, and it pulled everything.
Linyi Mianmian de Yang Network Technology · Zhao Zihan · 2025-04-16
What happened
绵绵的羊 (Mianmian de Yang) was a Chinese sanitary-pad brand founded in 2023 by internet celebrity Zhao Zihan. Late in 2024, after established makers were exposed for cutting corners on pad length and materials, consumers fled to the new brand's online flagship. Its store reached 2.57 million followers — more than Sofy (2.03m), Whisper (1.20m) and Freedom (1.60m) — built almost entirely on the founder's personal livestreams.
The brand made none of its own product. It operated as a 委托方 (commissioning party), contracting production to outside manufacturers including Nuochen Co. and Quanzhou Luojiang Huifeng Maternal and Child Supplies. Zhao Zihan insisted the model was 代加工 not 贴牌 — outsourced manufacturing, not mere sticker-labelling — and said a自有 factory was a future plan.
On 16 April 2025 buyers began posting that opened packs contained 黑色异物 and 黄色污渍; one asked online whether the black specks were 'black cotton or bug eggs'. The Black Cat complaint platform held over forty grievances naming the brand, covering allergic reactions, foreign matter and poor service. The next day the company paused sales across its whole network to cooperate with a Shandong provincial investigation team that tested and sealed finished stock.
On 22 April the company reported the investigation's result: no harmful substances and no systemic quality problem were found, and its production and sales processes were legal and compliant. The same day, Zhao Zihan resumed selling pads in the brand's Douyin livestream room. The episode's cost was not a recall verdict but a collapse of the trust the brand had been sold on — a quality promise the brander did not, and could not, guarantee.
Why it happened
- The brand sold personal trust on a product it did not make. The streamer's audience was the moat, but the pad was contracted out, so the brander had no direct hand in what its reputation rested on.
- Outsourced making without your own factory is a control gap: the maker, not the name on the pack, decided what shipped, and the brander could inspect the line only after a complaint.
- The brand rose on competitors' scandals, not on proof of its own. 'Others cut corners, try us' converts fear into sales, and the same fear into scrutiny the moment a single pad is wrong.
- Customer service called the defect 'truly unexpected' — confirming the brand had no quality process of its own behind the manufacturer's word.
The lesson
When you sell a product on your own reputation but let someone else make it, every defect is yours and every control is theirs — own the factory or own the inspection, never just the name.
Aftermath
The Shandong investigation found no harmful substances and no systemic defect, and sales resumed within a week. But the brand had been bought as the safe alternative to makers caught cutting corners, and the episode made clear it had no production of its own to be safe with. A brand that outsold the category leaders on trust had outsourced the very thing that trust was about.
Sources
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