Why Luckin's Meme-Character Coffee Collab Backfired
Luckin's collaboration with a beloved set of WeChat 'crying' stickers went wrong within hours: the memes it licensed already carry a joke, and the joke is that the drink is terrible — or looks like something worse.
Luckin Coffee launched a collaboration with Xianluo Lipu (暹罗厘普) — a wildly popular set of WeChat sticker characters known for tearful, self-deprecating despair — on September 28, teasing that the pack's "four carnivores and one herbivore" would arrive with new drinks. By the next morning, the trending hashtag read "Luckin's sticker collab looks like pee" (瑞幸联名表情包 像尿).
The problem was grammar, not design. One of the campaign images uses the franchise's crying rabbit clutching a Luckin cup — an image that, in sticker vocabulary, does not say delicious; it says the drink has reduced you to tears. Weibo users read the campaign as an accidental confession: "Luckin thought it meant 'so good you cry,'" one reply put it, above a circulating screenshot of the character captioned "tastes bad" (难喝). Others went cruder still, deciding the beige drink in the artwork looked like urine.
"Luckin's PR woke up to a fallen sky," one Weibo account wrote. "This is sitting an exam without reading the question."
Sticker packs (表情包) are China's working language of feeling — chats are captioned not with words but with borrowed faces — and each pack carries fixed emotional uses its fans police closely. Luckin has built much of its consumer brand on rapid-fire collaborations, and the playbook usually works: rent a beloved image, attach it to a drink, let the internet do the marketing. Xianluo Lipu is beloved precisely for expressing misery and mock abuse — which is why the campaign's own art could be screenshotted and reused, unchanged, to mock the product. Luckin's official countdown poster for the launch, six of the pack's coffee-cup characters announcing they had "already waited" for the holidays, reads as cheerful; the pack's fans read its crying rabbit very differently.
The drinks went on sale on schedule, and by the afternoon after launch Luckin had made no public statement. Its teasers remain on the account — and the crying rabbit is already doing new work, the campaign's own images circulating as the meme for a bad drink.