Who
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.
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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.