When a fast food restaurant chain launches a marketing campaign, ninety-nine percent of the time, they center it on the best-selling item on their menu.  But, what happens when your best-selling item is so delicious, so satisfying that it goes viral overnight, and it becomes a product that the masses get so curious about that people are willing to fight each other for it?

When Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen began selling their simple yet yummy chicken sandwich in the Spring of 2019, they couldn’t have possibly foreseen the media attention that they would receive from it. After all, not only did the sandwich practically go viral overnight in the press and on social media, the fried chicken chain had to figure out a way to capitalize on the sell-out sensation.

When Popeyes approached us in the Summer of ‘19 about designing a ugly Christmas fried chicken sandwich sweater for them, we jumped at the chance. Putting together an A-Z marketing plan for the Popeye’s campaign, we collaborated closely with the fast food fried chicken chain on the creation of several of the key pieces inside the campaign. We not only created the bulk of the campaign’s SEO-friendly web content and ecommerce landing pages, we also worked on product listings for the sweater across all of the most popular ecommerce sites.  And as we have done in the past for so many of our collaborators, we also took care of the processing for the massive volume of customer orders that came in for the sweater, but also drop-shipped them for the company, our shipping team dedicated to making sure that every Popeyes customer that ordered an ugly Christmas chicken sweater had it shipped out to them in the same day they ordered it.

And just as their amazing fried chicken sandwich had sold out, Popeyes ugly Christmas fried chicken sweater sold out just as quickly. Within hours of putting out a press release detailing our collaboration together,  the super fun, social media-friendly, custom-printed ugly fried chicken sweater got major media coverage on hundreds of new outlets. From Fox News, CNN and Good Morning America to USA Today,  the Popeyes Ugly Christmas Sweater was such an internet sensation that it was even converted into a resale item for some.   Amazon, Poshmark, Etsy, even people on Ebay who had been lucky enough to get one even capitalized on the popularity of our Popeyes ugly holiday sweater.  Some even on the popular auction site selling the sweater for prices starting at $200.

All in all, the Popeyes ugly Christmas sweater that we designed for the fast food company was a huge marketing success.  When the company integrated the sweater into their viral marketing strategy, it not only showed the social media generation that they were a fun company, it also gave them a huge boost in brand visibility, not to mention, a pretty significant revenue increase.