We’re used to seeing familiar brands produce familar products. After designer bags? Louis Vuitton has you covered. Hungry for some fried chicken? KFC has what you need. When brands step out of their normal wheelhouse with unexpected products the results can sometimes be successful and other times well, these custom items speak for themselves!
5) Nintendo Brand Playing Cards
This one is a bit deceptive as Nintendo has been producing playing cards since the company began. Video game fans may be surprised to learn that at one point the promotional card decks (each featuring Nintendo’s brand) were the company’s bread and butter! Of course, once video games started growing as an industry in the 1980’s so did Nintendo’s focus on digital rather than physical games. These days they only make a few card varieties under smaller, specialised labels.
4) Noel Gallagher x Adidas Customised Shoes
We’ve seen sneaker brands collaborate with celebrity sports starts over the years (who can forget the phenomena that were Air Jordans?) but 90’s music stars? We aren’t sure exactly what possessed Adidas to team up with admittedly the most functional of the two Gallagher brothers from the band Oasis, but in 2017 they did just that releasing limited editing promotional shoes with Noel’s golden image and signature on them. We’re not sure of the exact market for these and remain genuinely baffled by the exercise.
3) Zippo Lighters Makes Promotional Perfume
Zippo is synonymous with quality lighters for the discerning smoker. They only do one standard type of product, but they do it well enough that when someone asks for a “Zippo”, you know they mean a heavy metal lighter. However, just because they specialise in one product doesn’t mean they haven’t tried to sell other concepts. Take, for example, the Zippo Fragrance for Ladies. That’s right, perfume for women sold in an oversized lighter-shaped container. Needless to say, this promotion earned a lot of confused looks and very few sales.
2) Kellogg’s Customised Casual Clothing Range
Ah Kellogg’s, everyone’s favourite breakfast cereal producer! But did you know that ten years ago, they also released their own painfully awkward streetwear range called “Under the Hood.” And if this weren’t embarrassing enough, they also emblazoned them not with subtle decoration but with logo branding resembling colourful vomit. This range made the company an absolute laughing stock back in 2008, but since then a lot of other odd companies have released promotional streetwear, so perhaps they were ahead of their time. (Nahhhh.)
1) Every Promotional Product from Supreme
When it comes to weird and ridiculous promotional goods, Supreme has the competition beat. Established in the early 90’s as an authentic line of skating goods and clothes, Supreme has since grown into a luxury streetwear brand known as much for their kooky promo goods as for their popular hoodies, pants, and shirts. Examples of their more outrageous promotional products include a promotional Supreme stress brick, Supreme branded fire extinguishers, a Supreme novelty money cannon, a set of Supreme printed nunchucks, and even some Baoding balls decorated with the Supreme logo. Yeah, Supreme really knows their weird promotional goods like no other company out there.
Idea inspired by: http://www.cracked.com/article_20460_the-9-most-utterly-insane-products-released-by-famous-brands.html
