Madonna at Miniso: A New Wave of Celebrity Blind-Box Ads
Madonna, Katy Perry, and Paris Hilton turn Miniso’s blind-box aisles into paparazzi-ready runways.
Iconic, to me.
⏰ Sun, Dec 7, 2025 @ 12 PM PST
🐟 Published from Seattle, USA
🔨 Built by Chase Burns Broderick
“Where did that guy come from?” said an early-20-something model to another early-20-something model, referring to me.
After getting back from Hong Kong this week, I held a pop-up shop in Seattle during Pioneer Square Art Walk, and while not everyone was buying—Americans are broke—my booth of blind boxes and trendy toys quickly became a photoshoot set-up.
Four models, who’d just walked in Seattle fashion designer Dan McLean’s pop-up gothy holiday runway, spent at least 15 minutes taking photos in front of my dolls, mostly indie toys recently imported from Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Of course, I was only in the way, so I let them finish and disappeared into the backdrop of inventory.
Funnily, the shoot they set up—high-flash, paparazzi-style shots of hot baddies in a toy shop—has become the main marketing template for the major toy retailer Miniso, with Madonna acting as the company’s most recent muse:
It’s a recurring scene on Miniso’s feeds: Madonna in a fuzzy pink coat at the Oxford Street flagship, Katy Perry grinning with a basket full of plushies, Paris Hilton and her family working the aisles in Santa Monica, all framed as if they wandered in mid-errand and got papped between the Squishmallows and Sanrio plushies.
Miniso’s official captions gush about “just stopping by” and “picking out our cutest favorites,” but the repetition across markets turns these drop-ins into a clear holiday playbook: use ultra-famous women as proof that it’s normal, even aspirational, to lose your mind over blind boxes.
When did Katy Perry, Paris Hilton, and Madonna go to Miniso?
A recent timeline:
In late November 2025, Paris Hilton and her family happen to stop by Miniso’s Santa Monica store. The brand reposts the footage across regional accounts, and fans trade clips of her reportedly dropping around $4,000 on plushies and blind boxes. In Paris’ own video on Xiaohongshu, she uses the hook from Tyla’s new single “Chanel,” which is also featured in Madonna’s video from a few days ago.
Around the same time, Katy Perry’s China tour is wrapped in Miniso branding. An escalator shot with a red Miniso bag in the “Bandaids” video, plus store visits amplified by Miniso accounts in China, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and beyond, turning her into a roaming billboard.
By early December, Madonna and her twin daughters are photographed loading up on toys at Miniso’s Oxford Street flagship. Immediately, those images are clipped into reels and syndicated from London to India to the global @miniso.official feed.
I reached out to Miniso about their potential ad spends—will update if I hear back.
What is Miniso?
For the uninitiated: Miniso is a Chinese-led lifestyle and variety retailer founded in Guangzhou in 2013 by entrepreneur Ye Guofu, operating over 7,000 stores worldwide by mid-2024 selling low-priced household goods, cosmetics, stationery, and pop “trendy toys.” Its business model fuses China’s robust supply chains with highly designed products and a heavy reliance on intellectual property (IP), from licensed collaborations with global franchises like Disney and One Piece to an expanding stable of self-owned characters developed through its TOPTOY collectible sub-brand and in-house IP incubation plan.
After an early phase as a “ten-yuan shop” with Japanese-inspired aesthetics, Chinese shoppers criticized Miniso in 2022 for presenting itself as a Japanese brand and the company publicly apologized, promising to foreground its Chinese identity—while shifting its brand focus from affordability toward an emotionally driven “joyful lifestyle” positioning.
Why are celebrities taking photos at Miniso?
What’s interesting about these paparazzi-style Miniso shots—which must be expensive—is that they aren’t classic glossy commercials. They’re designed to look like proof of life. You’re watching Madonna in a very real store, sitting under a “Zootropolis 2” banner, kids on either side, shopping bags on the floor, phones out. The whole setup is built to answer one question that pops up in the comments over and over: Is this real or AI?
Over the last few years, brands have flooded feeds with influencers and AI “hosts,” and the result is a kind of advertising uncanny valley—every video feels a little fake, a little slop. The general wisdom five years ago was that people trusted influencers more than traditional commercials; now, the line between a real creator and a synthetic one is blurry enough that trust online has evaporated. So Miniso goes in the opposite direction.
Show a recognizable celebrity holding the actual product, in the actual store, with their actual family, lit like a fan video instead of a perfume campaign. There’s a new kind of authenticity in advertising, and it feels a lot like the 2000s-era paparazzi run-ins.
