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The Click’s Emotional Support Demon Plushie, released December 2022, sold over 25,000 units, at 12714% funded. This makes it Makeship’s highest-selling campaign of all time, and worthy of further examination.
We can tease out several important factors contributing to the success of The Click’s Emotional Support Demon. Rather than creating a character that was based on himself, or his persona (such as previous Makeship Plushie Cliccy Kitty), this particular design began organically as an inside joke with The Click’s community.
“It became a meme inside a video to begin with, so my very first sketch of this plushie was a meme inside a video,” The Click told us. “People latched on to the concept [of] ‘Emotional Support Demon.’ The demon changed a lot over this time…the fandom saw it evolve from an internal joke to a little bit more refined, to see the character develop, to turn into a sketch and [finally], a Plushie.”
Beyond the fact that this Plushie design started within his community directly, another factor to consider within the success of this particular Plushie is that, despite the internal joke, the idea of an ‘Emotional Support Demon’ is broadly appealing - it’s a concept that anyone can understand even if they don’t know the origins of the joke or they are not a big fan of The Click himself. “The Demon is very publicly likable, it’s not specifically me as a Plushie - the concept of having a mascot that you all appreciate in common, instead of making a Plushie of yourself, seems to sell more,” The Click reflected with us.
Apart from the nature of the design and the Plushie itself, The Click’s approach to campaign promotion also helped steer the success of his product. He launched with a bang thanks to his interactive and goal-setting live stream, and continued to promote his Plushie daily on his social platforms.
The Click’s campaign, the Emotional Support Demon, became Makeship’s all-time bestselling campaign in January 2023 with 25429 units sold (12714%). The Click previously ran 3 other campaigns:
The Click’s campaign launched during the holiday season, and while fans would not receive their Plushie immediately, it still made for an amazing holiday gift. To encourage fans to get the Emotional Support Demon as a gift for friends or family, The Click even made Christmas cards for the product, providing the purchaser with ‘proof’ that an Emotional Support Demon Plushie was coming the recipient’s way.
The idea of an ‘Emotional Support Demon’ started as an inside joke within one of The Click’s YouTube videos, resulting in a rough sketch from The Click himself, before eventually evolving into the Plushie design we have today.
The Click began his campaign rollout many months in advance, as fans organically grew attached to this idea of an Emotional Support Demon through his videos, before he finally announced that there would be a Plushie release for the character. He had a lengthy period of hype because of this – approximately 6-9 months – which unfolded naturally within his community alongside the refinement of the character, where fans were able to watch the progression too, as it evolved from a quick side joke to something much more fully-formed.
The launch of Emotional Support Demon was accompanied by a live stream on YouTube, which quickly exceeded The Click’s expectations. “I think I expected to sell 1000 or maybe 2000 if I stream for a long time,” however the stream ended with 4000-5000 units sold. The stream motivated fans to purchase a Plushie by not only counting down the minutes to the launch, but having goals and rewards to go along with them - for example, the sale of 500 Plushies meant that The Click would paint his nails; if he sold 1,000 Plushies, he would do a live stream from a hot tub - these quirky and fun community-based rewards encouraged fans to purchase on launch day.
Following his YouTube live stream, The Click maintained a consistent posting schedule when promoting his Plushie. In fact, The Click tweeted about his Plushie daily, and his Instagram feed was occupied with Plushie-based imagery solely throughout the duration of his campaign. “The Plushies are much more well-received than typical sponsorships, because it’s personal,” The Click told us concerning his frequent promotion of the Plushie. All that to say, the sentiment and reception to his Plushie-based posts were similar to any previous social posts he had done– “the reception was relatively similar, because something like the Demon is so incorporated within the community.” If the Plushie or product is therefore meaningful to the community and the creator, we can expect the community to react favorably to what may be deemed as ‘promotion’ of the product.
At the end of The Click's campaign, over 25,000 units of the Emotional Support Demon were sold. Given the success of the previous campaign, The Click has since launched a keychain version of the Emotional Support Demon.
Keith Stack is an online illustrator and web comic creator, based in New York, whose main social presence is on Twitter. He’s been creating comics in some form or another since the early 2000s and has developed a loyal following who now await his daily Twitter comic shares. These are mostly centered around his original characters, Brianne and Leslie, a lesbian couple who were inspired by the Ren & Stimpy cartoon. Both Brianne and Leslie have been turned into Makeship Plushies, and have sold over 1,000 units combined. Each campaign followed a similar promotion schedule, with a few unique twists, although the Brianne campaign was ultimately slightly more successful than Leslie - however in Keith’s estimation, this could simply be because of the character itself.
We spoke to Keith Stack to find out how he approached his product promotion strategy, and learn about a few key factors when it comes to Makeship campaign promotion in general.
Keith Stack is a web comic creator best known for his original characters, the lesbian couple, Brianne and Leslie. He resides solely on Twitter, where he currently has a following of just over 100,000.
Keith Stack has launched two successful Makeship Plushies. The first campaign, for his Leslie Plush, launched in October 2022 and was 246% funded with 493 units sold. His follow-up campaign, for the Brianne Plush, launched in February 2023 and exceeded the prior campaign with 581 units sold, at 290% funded.
For the purposes of this mini case study, we will mainly be focusing on the promotion of the Brianne Plushie.
As Keith explained to us in a recap conversation, his method for sharing his campaign did include some pre-campaign anticipation. “For both campaigns [Leslie and Brianne], I did a lead up in the week beforehand where I would show off a little bit of the Plush day by day to drum up excitement or make people aware that something is coming.”
“I would just place something in front of it and every day post a photo where the thing in front of it was nudged slightly,” he said. For fans in the know, these images made it clear that a new Makeship Plushie was on the way, without revealing the Plushie itself. For fans who may have been unaware of the previous campaign, these types of posts may have required a double take, or even reading through the replies, to understand what might be happening.
These posts laid the foundation for Keith’s launch post. According to Keith, the initial post was one of the most successful social shares from the campaign’s duration and thus one of the most important, alongside his “Ending Soon” post (more on that later). “There’s a big spike at the beginning and at the end…a whole bunch sold when I first promoted it,” as is often the case with a crowd-funding model, and thus good to keep in mind when planning out one’s promotion.
This initial post was not a Makeship-provided asset, but rather, a unique comic that Keith created specifically to promote the Brianne Plushie campaign, while remaining true to the ethos of his characters and his comic, and therefore appealing organically to his audience at large. This announcement post was not annoyingly obvious in its promotion either, although it did feature a real image of the Plushie - the thought bubbles played into each character, while still providing essential information for the potential buyer/fan, including the price of the plushie and where to buy it. The comic ended by pointing out the recent Twitter update at the time, and this too added to the organic quality of the post - it’s not ending on a note that makes the reader feel like they need to buy something.
Once the campaign was fully up and running, Keith remained consistent in the type of content he would share daily, ensuring he was perhaps even more active than usual. “I knew I would want to put out daily content for the duration of the campaign so I would have stuff to promote the campaign with,” Keith told us, admitting that, while there was a bit of preparation that went into this, he still also made comics on the fly each day.
“For the duration of the campaign I was posting my daily comics and afterwards I would have a separate tweet reply underneath that would promote it - and obviously the comics are what gets likes and spread around,” Keith said, explaining he would piggyback off these daily comics.
There’s another fun tactic Keith used in campaign promotion, and although it occurred during his Leslie Plushie campaign promotion, it’s worth noting here. During the height of the Leslie Plushie campaign, Keith embroiled himself in a bit of a fun Twitter war with a fellow content creator, who also had a Plushie live on Makeship at the time. While it was Keith who started the competition, it propelled both creators to rally their fanbases in an attempt to outpace the other when it came to sales.
“That was just a result of me checking Makeship’s site every day and noticing this campaign that launched at the sametime as me, they were doing better than me, so I was like it’d be pretty funny to make a little competition out of this,” Keith shared, “I figured there would be no hard feelings cause I’m also sort of promoting their Plush in the meantime.”
It ended up being something that kept fans on both sides interested and engaged throughout the campaign.
Keith noticed a spike in sales when he shared his final “Ending Soon” post to promote his Brianne Plush as well. “I realized it was the last day and I had some free time after work so I did a little animation in flash using the photos from the Makeship website,” Keith explained, relying on the basic Makeship products to create something wholly unique, rather than any specific Makeship-branded assets. This final share was straight-forward in its sentiment, urging fans to “BUY” before it’s too late.