Le Phuong Thao Swaps the Pageant Spotlight for Brand Building in Vietnam

Online retail in Vietnam has reached a turning point. According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, e-commerce sales have expanded by 20 to 30 per cent a year on average and made up roughly 11 per cent of total retail sales of goods and consumer services in 2025. On 1 July 2026, the country’s first standalone E-Commerce Law came into force, bringing new rules on seller identification, livestream selling and the responsibilities of platforms.

That shift has opened room for a new kind of specialist: people who sit between foreign brands and Vietnamese shoppers and interpret each side for the other. Le Phuong Thao, first runner-up at Miss Sports Vietnam 2022, is one of them. Her story follows a turn from shaping her own image to shaping images for others, and shows what that change asks of a person.

Picking the right stage

In March 2022, Thao made it through the casting round of Miss Universe Vietnam, the pageant that drew the most media attention in the country that year. She then stepped away from it and entered Miss Sports Vietnam instead, a smaller contest centred on athletic beauty. At the final, held in Ho Chi Minh City on 31 July 2022, she finished first runner-up and also won the pageant’s media award.

Her personal reasons are hers alone. Seen structurally, though, the move resembles what marketers call segment selection: rather than fight in the most crowded field, compete where your particular strength stands out most. In that year’s question round she spoke about mountain climbing, a passion that had taken her to 22 countries, pairing Sports and travel in a way that suited the spirit of the contest.

Before the pageant she spent several years modelling, including on the runway at Vietnam International Fashion Week, and also worked as a teacher. What tied these roles together was a practical education in how an image is built, how it is perceived and how it is valued.

Two traditions of branding

Press reports from 2022 say Thao holds a master’s degree in luxury brand management from Regent’s University London. The detail matters more than the qualification itself, because it shows which tradition of branding she was trained in.

Luxury management is a discipline of restraint: keep prices firm, limit supply and avoid discounts, since scarcity is part of what the customer is paying for. Mass-market e-commerce in Vietnam runs on almost the reverse principle, driven by vouchers, shopping festivals, subsidised delivery and livestreams that close orders within minutes. A foreign brand arriving in this market has to settle a question neither textbook answers: how far can it join the promotion cycle before it starts to wear down its own value?

Interpreting a market

Thao now describes herself as the founder of Leta LLC, a business she says focuses on brand development, cross-border growth and market entry between Vietnam and other countries. Based on information she supplied, the company has advised six international consumer brands and taken them into Vietnamese e-commerce, handling positioning, pricing, digital strategy, localisation and distribution.

Those five services sketch the job accurately. Positioning and pricing are the promise a brand makes. Localisation means keeping that promise in Vietnamese and in step with local routines and buying habits, which goes far beyond translating a label. Distribution is the plumbing underneath: warehouses, delivery partners, return policies, and the question of which legal entity appears as the seller.

That plumbing has just been redesigned. Under Law No. 122/2025/QH15, sellers must pass electronic identity verification before they can trade, platforms must identify the hosts of livestream sales, hosts may not give misleading information about a product’s quality or uses, and sellers are required to recall defective goods and compensate buyers. Platforms registered before 1 July 2026 have until 30 June 2027 to comply.

For intermediaries, the law shifts where the value lies. It moves away from listing a brand quickly or running efficient advertising and toward setting up the right structure from the outset: whether to sell directly or through a distributor, who handles complaints, and who is accountable for what a hired livestream host says on air. That kind of inside knowledge is harder to replace than any single campaign.

A rulebook of her own

In 2025, Thao published The Elite Game, a 136-page book in Vietnamese released by the Vietnam Women’s Publishing House together with the publisher Skybooks. It is arranged in six steps, moving from confidence built through small experiences and self-worth anchored in choosing goals and holding to them, through views on love and marriage and keeping emotion apart from a crisis, to strategic thinking and personal finance.

It is a self-help book written for women and deserves to be judged as one. Read alongside the author’s profession, however, it takes on a second layer. Its steps, from positioning oneself and setting goals to perseverance and keeping feelings out of decisions, double as principles of brand building. The last fits consulting especially well: every founder is attached to their product, and part of an adviser’s job is to tell them what the market really thinks of it.

The book opens by urging readers who want to join the few to ignore what the many say. In Thao’s line of work, that advice needs a counterweight. A brand that aims to stand apart still has to understand the mass market closely, because those are the people who decide whether to buy. Distinction is something you can choose. Understanding is something you have to learn.

From being noticed to being relied on

Thao’s route reflects a broader trend. Many young Vietnamese have built reputational capital through pageants, fashion and social media, and some are now trying to turn it into professional expertise, most often in branding and communications, the fields closest to hand. They bring a real advantage: they understand how an image is assembled and how the public reacts to it.

The two kinds of capital, however, are measured on different scales. Personal fame is counted in attention. Brand expertise is counted in outcomes others can check: sales, how long a brand lasts in the market, and clients willing to vouch for the people who helped them. For now, the figures about Leta come from Thao herself. For someone whose business is building trust on behalf of brands, the logical next step is to let those brands speak for themselves.

The market will soon create that moment. Once the law’s transition period closes on 30 June 2027, foreign brands selling in Vietnam will have to trade through identity-verified stores under seller names anyone can look up. At that point the track record of cross-border intermediaries, Leta among them, will be visible on the platforms themselves.