Red Lobster Interactive Sweater
How Our Ugly Christmas Sweaters Helped Red Lobster's Famous Biscuits Go Viral
Who doesn’t love Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay biscuits? After all, the restaurant’s Cheddar Bay biscuits are so well-known today in pop culture that even if you’ve never eaten at a Red Lobster restaurant, it is unlikely that you haven’t, at least, heard of their Cheddar Bay biscuit and just how delicious, yummy, and addictive they are. Not only are they available at every one of the company’s locations, Red Lobster also has a DIY kit that their customers can purchase at their local grocery store so they can make the biscuits at home. The biscuits are so well-known, in fact, that back in 2017, it was reported that Red Lobster makes nearly one million Cheddar Bay biscuits every day in their restaurant locations. And according to a spokesman for the seafood restaurant company, stacking their daily production of Cheddar Bay biscuits on top of one other, “would tower 137 times” above “the Empire State Building” in New York City.
When Red Lobster approached us here at UglyChristmasSweater.com in 2019 to create an ugly Christmas sweater for their seafood loving customers that they could rollout in their first-ever pop-up merchandise store online, they wanted a unique and fun ugly holiday sweater that featured lobsters, biscuits and snowflakes, a ugly holiday sweater that truly had the potential to go viral on social media; a sweater that would not only complement the other fun Red Lobster apparel, accessories, and collectables they had but one that would match their insulated Red Lobster fanny pack that they had just made available for their seafood loving and biscuit-obsessed customers in the previous months.
When we were tasked with creating an Red Lobster ugly sweater with a built-in oven pocket so their customers could literally pocket their famous Cheddar Bay biscuits, keep them warm for hours on end on their person, we had to engineer a one-of-a-kind design that would not only be fun, social-media stylish, we also had to create a Cheddar Bay biscuit ugly holiday sweater that would also be comfortable to wear, but one that would also be able to pass safety tests at the FDA. In order to create the Red Lobster ugly holiday we had to take our favorite insulated products, break them apart, test various insulated materials, and then start sourcing. Ultimately, we came up with a beautifully-designed, super unique, fun-to-wear, eye-catching and head-turning, social media-friendly, FDA-approved ugly Christmas sweater.
The Red Lobster biscuit sweater became an internet viral sensation only a day or two following the seafood company’s unveiling of the promotional item across their social media channels in the Fall of ‘19; the sweater was the perfect promotional item for the restaurant chain, because it not only sold out faster than anyone could have anticipated, the exposure the sweater gave the long-running company meant that it was getting more media coverage than it had likely received in years prior.
The Red Lobster ugly Christmas sweater had not only been seen by the company’s current customer base, but it was also seen and shared by those of other age demographics, likely the 86% of 18-29-year-olds and the 77% of 30-49-year-olds that spend at over 35-minutes every day surfing the social media platform. The company and the biscuit oven sweater also received major press coverage across the world. Websites such as USA Today’s Pop Sugar, The Daily Mail U.K., The Daily Mail U.S., People, Fox News and CNN reported on the ugly Christmas sweater promotion item; it seems as if the internet was inspired by the over sweater; high-traffic mom blogs, food blogs and websites, tech and trend websites, geek culture websites all wrote about the Red Lobster ugly holiday sweater; the Clear Channel network of television stations across the United States each blogged about the company’s fun and unique item.
Offering a fun, interactive, memorable ugly Christmas sweater to their seafood loving and biscuit-obsessed customers showed every user of social media that the Orlando-based company was still interested in being relevant, contemporary, opening to changing with the times and trends after several years in business; it showed that Red Lobster was interested in young and old people; it helped the company to reach out to all age demographics, attract new customers and followers, increase their brand visibility, and remind the world that they weren’t just one of the United States’s long-running brands; it reminded everyone that they were also fun.