Meet The Kiwi Entrepreneur Who Sold $3.5 Million Worth of Waist Trainers

It's hard not to hate Iyia Liu.

While most 23-year-olds are still finding their feet in the world, this Kiwi is set for life - all thanks to a bizarre beauty trend.

The waist trainer craze, endorsed by celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, swept the internet last year as young women around the world sought to emulate their idols' hourglass figures.

Liu was one of them. Along with a desire to cinch her waist, the young commerce graduate had a burning entrepreneurial ambition.

After noticing the waist trainer - a contemporary version of the 16th century corset - on Instagram, she scraped together $6000 and ordered a batch from a supplier in China.

As the orders came pouring in, Liu scrambled to hire eight staff members. Within a year, her brand Waist Trainer New Zealand Australia turned over $3.5 million, delivering almost $1m in profits.

"I thought I'd just sell a few," Liu said of her decision to stock the waist trainers from the struggling online boutique she'd started as a side project while at uni. "It just grew exponentially."

With a marketing strategy focused solely on Facebook and Instagram, Liu is among a growing number of young entrepreneurs to leverage the social media profiles of bloggers and celebrities to drive sales.

In July, she paid Kylie Jenner almost $300,000 to post a photograph of herself wearing the waist trainer on Instagram. It was liked 1.5 million times, and sales leads were tracked through the promo code "Kylie".

While the investment has now paid itself off, Liu said, "the return was not as fast as I thought it would be".

But sponsored posts remained the most effective form of marketing her products. She's now sold almost 100,000 waist trainers to customers in 90 countries around the world.