A perfume sold for €4.99 by high street budget clothing and textiles store Zeeman has flown off the shelves and is now being offered on auction site Marktplaats for multiple times that amount, the AD reports.

The perfume which is called Lucht (air) and comes in two varieties, is a Zeeman product and was introduced to shoppers last Saturday alongside a campaign pointing out that most perfume is so expensive because of marketing campaigns. Within hours every single bottle had sold out both in the shops and online.

The runaway success of the perfume came as a surprise for Zeeman despite earlier successful campaigns involving a €29.99 wedding dress and a cheap pair of sneakers, which the company claimed were every bit as good as designer footwear.

‘We know that a special product can have this effect and we hoped the same thing would happen again with the perfume. We bought in large quantities but this was unexpected,’ marketing manager Caroline van Turenhout said.

Zeeman has said new stock is on its way and that the perfume was meant for people who cannot afford pricey perfumes. It called on people not to pay the Marktplaats prices which in one case had gone up to around €65.

The perfume is still available in Zeeman’s international shops, a quick look at the various websites shows. Dutch tourists who find themselves in Spain, Germany or France will still be able to get their hands on a bottle of Aire, Luft or Air.

Zeeman, whose founder Jan Zeeman died last year, has shops in Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Spain and Austria.