More YouTube Creator Brands are coming to major stores near you: Interview series Hot works together with Panda Expressand children’s animation Blippi brings out a shoe with Reebok.
These deals are, well, a big deal. Brands work with creatives every day, and more and more of them are realizing the power of influencer marketing, but it’s a significant step in engagement for companies to go from paying for a few sponsored posts to offering a creator-branded product in their stores. This is a growing trend, especially in the food and beverage space, with brands like Zaxby’s And Dunkin’ already hanging MrBeast, Nick DiGiovanniAnd SypherPK to release your own menu items.
Hot Ones joins them with Flaming Bourbon Chickena boneless chicken bite that in its typical Last swab Apollo Sauce. Interesting note: Hot Ones says Last Dab is the only hot sauce in the world made with Apollo peppers, so it’s an innovative, unique product that may have caught the attention of Panda Express as the chain experiments with increasingly spicier dishes.
Subscribe to get the latest developer news
If this partnership sounds familiar, it is because Hot Ones (whose channel First we celebrate has 13 million subscribers and generates over 100 million views per month) first partnered with Panda Express for a small regional test of this dish in late 2023. That test apparently went well, because Blazing Bourbon Chicken is now rolling out to all Panda Express stores in the U.S. Hungry customers can get it starting September 4.
Blippi, meanwhile, is celebrating his 10th anniversary on YouTube with the release of a four-piece shoe collection for kids. Reebok has snapped up the deal and will release the shoes in preschool and toddler sizes starting September 3 on its website and at “select retailers worldwide.”
The four shoes are inspired by different aspects of Blippi’s YouTube presence, where he has 20 million subscribers and has garnered over 250 million views so far in August alone. There’s an orange and blue colorway that mimics Blippi’s own outfit, a “Classic Leather” edition with Blippi graphics, a “Zig N Glow” edition with printed lyrics from his popular song “I’m an Excavator” and finally a Meekah edition, named after Blippi’s best friend who joined the channel in 2021.
These creator-made additions to major brands are making the world of digital content more and more ubiquitous. You already can’t walk into a Walmart or gas station without seeing Festivals, JoyrideAnd Prime (two of which are now quite controversial) and with the creators having more viewers than ever before, we expect to see their products on more and more shelves.
