Popeyes became a cultural phenomenon in 2019 with the launch of its now famous Chicken Sandwich. As 2020 approached, we were tasked with finding ways to keep the brand relevant and top of mind in the world of popular culture. In January 2020, international pop superstar Beyoncé released a fashion collection with Adidas. It sold out instantly. But not before fans noticed that the items looked nearly identical to the employee uniforms at Popeyes, and erupted a conversation on Twitter. 

Beyoncé dropped a new fashion collection that seemed to be inspired by our employee uniforms. So after her clothes sold out, we democratized fashion by giving her fans the opportunity to purchase our real employee uniforms themselves. We recreated Beyonce’s launch campaign shot for shot with real Popeyes employees, and created a website mimicking the one created by Beyonce and Adidas. The only thing we didn’t create from scratch were the uniforms themselves. Because they were the exact ones our employees had worn every day for years. 

Beyonce and Adidas generated endless headlines in the publications that cover fashion, entertainment and culture. Once the collection sold out, we wanted fans to know that there was an opportunity to get the next best thing: the uniforms that seemed to inspire it.  We targeted the same publications that covered Beyonce, and pitched our story, with a collection of assets featuring shot for shot recreations of the promotional images Beyonce and Adidas created. Organically, the content was distributed via Twitter, the same platform where comparisons between Beyonce’s collection and our uniforms was born. 

Within moments of Beyonce’s collection selling out, we sourced the internal Popeyes Employee store for the items that most closely resembled the pieces in Queen Bey’s capsule. Then, we recreated Beyonce’s campaign shot for shot with real Popeyes employees as the models, and sold the clothing on a custom Shopify site meant to mimic that of Adidas. The campaign was announced on Twitter, the same place comparisons between Beyonce’s collection and Popeyes uniforms were born. 

That Look From Popeyes redefined what fashion can be, by turning everyday employee uniforms into a hot selling fashion statement. It turned a QSR brand into an in vogue fashion brand, and made sure that 6,000 employees around the world had a built in fashion item in their closets. The idea generated over 892 million earned media impressions, totaling over $8.8 million dollars in ad value, and became an organic trending topic globally on Twitter during the week of the Super Bowl, the most cluttered and competitive moment in advertising. In the end, the campaign reversed the influencer marketing model, seeing everyday people pay the brand a combined $30,000 to become Popeyes influencers, rather than paying them to wear our brand as most campaigns do.