Lovehoney: Expect Another ‘Outbreak’ of Fifty Shades Fever this June
“Outbreak” indeed. Plague possibly.
Lovehoney has announced it’s planning a fresh push for its themed products associated with “Fifty Shades Freed” — the film currently pulling in two stars and a 4.4/10 ranking on IMDB. The push ties in with the film’s DVD release on June 18th.
As reported by ETO, Lovehoney said that sales of all their “Fifty Shades” product collections are up by 21 percent in the last year. The premiere of “Fifty Shades Freed” this past February was a big sales driver for the collections overall.
Though perhaps inducing deep, hard eyerolls in more skeptical sorts — which, for a film/series described as “so awful that it needs to be reviewed in detail to be believed,” this is to be expected — retailers all over the world have got behind the “Fifty Shades” collections. Novelty products are, obvs, very different from awful films.
Per ETO, retailers devote windows to “Fifty Shades”-themed products and even stage in-store events to capitalize on the interest generated by the movie. Lovehoney said that, at the two Harmony stores in London, window displays helped increase sales of the products by around a third. At Kondomeriet in Norway, a month-long promotion aired in cinemas received more than 15,000 responses in the first two weeks. In the U.S., Lion’s Den organized a promotion featuring six billboards on main highways in Ohio.
There were other promotional events held in the U.K. and U.S., as well as Ireland, Lithuania, Sweden, South Korea, Ukraine, Australia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France — all successful. So though this “Fifty Shades” stuff may make zero sense on a personal level, that’s not the point.
Via ETO, Lovehoney sales consultant Laura Wood said,“The ‘Fifty Shades’ phenomenon is still going strong more than six years after the release of the books, and it remains the best-known sex brand in the world. The cinema release of the films drive sales of the product range, with the DVD release a few months later providing renewed interest.”
“We are very lucky to have such fantastic retail partners all over the world who have really helped to push the products with exciting in-store displays and eye-catching promotions. The DVD release presents a fresh opportunity to generate more sales, not just for the ‘Freed’ products but also the earlier ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ and the original ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ collections, which are both still selling well,” Wood added.
I don’t get it, but you better!