Twitter
Alex From Target was mostly made famous by females on Twitter, data from Brandwatch showed. Reuters

Most people have heard of Alex from Target by now, but it’s not clear what he did or why he became famous. It appears a Target customer simply took a picture of Alex while he was bagging her products and then he suddenly turned into a social phenomenon. There were more than 46,000 mentions of #AlexFromTarget in the first 24 hours his name began to trend, according to data powered by Brandwatch.

It’s mostly girls and women who are talking about #AlexFromTarget, 67 to 33 percent. When it came to the hashtag #AskAlexAQuestion, the ratio was 47 percent female to 36 percent male, Brandwatch said.

It appears Alex’s “fame” might have landed him a gig on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” The Twitter user posted a picture of him on a plane with the caption “Landed in LA.” (Alex is apparently from Texas.) It was retweeted more than 14,000 times by his fans.

He also shared a message from Ellen DeGeneres that read, “Hey, #AlexFromTarget, it’s #EllenFromEllen.” That message was shared more than 110,000 times. There’s no official word if he will be on her show, but the comedian joked she got an #AlexFromTarget tattoo.

Alex, whose last name has not been revealed, has nearly 550,000 Twitter followers, which is hundreds of thousands more than he had Sunday morning. While he seems to be relishing in his new-found stardom, so does his employer.

“Imagine our surprise yesterday when one of our Target team members managed to flood the Internet with images of red and khaki without even trying,” Molly Snyder, a spokeswoman for Target, wrote in an email to the Huffington Post. “We are proud to have a great team, including #AlexFromTarget.”

Follow me on Twitter @mariamzzarella