One of the most talked-about absences in marketing this year is the lack of HeyTea (喜茶) co-brandings. Once one of the top collaborators, HeyTea has had several memorable collabs in recent years, from the Fendi collab in 2023 to the Yayoi Kusama team-up last year. But after the Hello Kitty partnership last December, there hasn’t been another collaboration since. Meanwhile, co-branding has become a regular practice for competitors, even beyond marketing. Finally, in August, HeyTea launched its first collaboration of the year, and it’s with the Japanese manga and anime IP Chiikawa (ちいかわ).
The key visual of the collaboration features the small and cute protagonists from the manga, Chiikawa, Hachiware and Usagi, wearing HeyTea uniforms, similar to the IP’s past ramen collabs in Japan. The drinks themselves are classic HeyTea flavours brought back due to popular demand.
Merch-wise, you can buy stickers and employee name tags with the three characters, as well as porcelain cups of each character, with your purchase. Of course, there are free paper bags and sleeves with official graphics.
- #喜茶 CHIIKAWA HeyTea Chiikawa: 9.97 million views on Weibo, ranking number 15 on the Hot Search list
- #喜茶CHIIKAWA联名 HeyTea Chiikawa collaboration: 5.61 million views on Weibo
Notably, the collaboration was launched through Alibaba’s licensing service Alifish (阿里云). Chiikawa has become one of the hottest IPs in Mainland China, where HeyTea became its first tea co-branding partner, along with Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Official pop-ups from the IP and collabs are becoming more frequent, with the latest co-branding with MINISO launched in late July. As IP collaborations gradually become the mainstream over brand, artist and celebrity collabs, HeyTea is once again on the pulse of the zeitgeist, after its “anti-involution” open letters and ongoing focus on differentiation.
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