Viewpoint | Through her personal newsletter, Vivy Yusof issued and emotional update of the vital status of her business Duck Group, and successfully gained quite the sympathy windfall

Vivy Yusof enjoying the sun in troubled times. Photo: vivyyusof/Instagram

The impassioned appeal rang hollow. Nevertheless, it was put out for fan/subscriber consumption. A week ago, Vivy Yusof shared on her personal “newsletter” Sincerely, Vivy—a sort of born-again bulletin of her defunct Proudduck blog—the reasons behind the shutting down of her fesyen businesses. She was compelled to do so because “Every day, I receive messages about dUCk,” referring to her brand in the preferred Spongebob case. Quoting her fans, she detailed questions such as “some ask about its status, why the website has been shut down, where they can buy it now, some even ask me to sell my own scarves to them, and whether dUCk will ever return.” This was, to many, not a sincere accounting; it was a calculated boast, and it is unclear if she was highlighting isolated fan interest to imply enduring demand or if she interprets this as proof that her brand should be revived.

She continued to polish her halo of hardship, stating that “I am no longer involved in decision-making. Since Khazanah sold to the new investors, I have remained only as a minority shareholder and lost both my board seat and control over the company.” She recounted how Khazanah’s mentioning of the share sale of FashionValet in Parliament and the freezing of the company’s accounts by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) have affected her. “It was as if we were killed instantly,” she dramatised. “We could no longer do business. Finished.” The pantomime of finality is clear. So emotionally-charged the language was that the objective was unambiguous: to elicit sympathy and underscore the abruptness of FashionValet’s eventual collapse. It evoked a tragedy that is almost Shakespearean and helplessness that is total.

Still managing her narrative with a flair that the late auteur Yasmin Ahmad would call bohong (bluff), Ms Yusof pressed on: “It is very unfair. And if this is the reality entrepreneurs face in Malaysia, we have a lot to think about,” cleverly turning a personal downfall into a systemic critique. FashionValet received RM47 million in sovereign investment, posted years of losses, and did not deliver returns. That’s not a systemic breakdown—it’s business ruin. By invoking “entrepreneurs in Malaysia,” she shifts the lens from her own decisions to a broader, vague injustice, without specifying what structural barriers were at play. “But I have to accept the fate,” she continued, “that the brand I created with so much love and care has now become history. It is the most painful place for me to be, which is to only be able to watch from the outside.” An award for the best wayang of martyrdom was waiting in the wings—a trophy Elizabeth Holmes would love to receive, even in jail.

​What Ms. Yusof’s splendid narrative overlooked was the context that triggered her sudden loss of control—a context that she, as co-founder and, later, CEO, must have been fully aware of. She wasn’t just a symbolic figurehead; she was deeply embedded in the operational and strategic decisions of FashionValet and Duck. Years of financial losses was the crux of the issue. The intervention by the Malaysian MACC was not arbitrary; it was a consequence of the RM43.9 million investment losses incurred by government-linked investment companies (GLICs), Khazanah Nasional Berhad and Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB). Her dramatic account of being “killed instantly” and unjustly treated came after she and her husband were charged with criminal breach of trust (CBT) involving RM8 million in funds.

Ms Yusof posing for Duck. Photo: duck/Instagram

The instant death of her company, she suggests, evokes violence against creativity—as if the brand were a living entity snuffed out by bureaucracy. It’s melodramatic, yes—but also deeply revealing of how she saw her role: not just as a businesswoman, but as a creator whose work was prematurely silenced. She positioned herself not just as a co-founder, who was able to commercialise an “aha moment”, but as a bereaved creator mourning the demise of her artistic child, put to rest by titans she could not control. Her pain may be real, but her public narrative of being “powerless,” “heartbroken,” and “watching from the outside”, while emotionally compelling, sidestepped the fact that she was intimately involved in the decisions that led to the collapse of her businesses. The sudden loss of control wasn’t capricious—it was the culmination of years of misalignment between brand storytelling and financial stewardship.

When founders frame their downfall as fate rather than consequence, it distorts the lessons others, including fellow entrepreneurs, might learn. It also risks eroding public trust—especially when taxpayer money is involved. This final, calculated appeal to her fanbase reveals an irony that cut through her sterling performance. She had previously shared that she wanted to achieve the untenable: to be an “un-influencer”, yet she used her newsletter and IG to announce her lupus diagnosis and to defend the use of her visage as the face of her brand, suggesting she is pathologically dependent on it (yes, media and muka) In her #18 missive, wryly titled ‘Chicken Scarf, Then?’, she mourned not just a business. As her fans said, she could have started another brand. Rather, she grieved a self-styled identity, one built on visibility, aspiration, and control. To suddenly be sidelined in her own story was, therefore, “unfair”. Vivy Yusof’s genius isn’t in building an enduring business, but in convincing an audience that her spectacular commercial collapse was something other than the direct, costly result of her own making. Pathos can be powerful. We see it on social media all the time.

Illustrative photo: Just So