Paramount Bets on Unified Ecommerce Site for ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Yellowstone’ and More Merch (Exclusive)
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Paramount Global is rolling out a mountain of merchandise with the launch of a new unified e-commerce store for its portfolio of brands and franchises.
From Paramount Pictures, CBS, MTV, BET and Comedy Central to Nickelodeon and Showtime, from Top Gun, Transformers, The Godfather, Yellowstone, Star Trek, The Daily Show and Survivor to SpongeBob SquarePants, Paw Patrol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Beavis & Butt-Head, South Park, Yellowjackets, Clueless and Mean Girls – the entertainment conglomerate is bringing together consumer products for its various brands, franchises and hits on its first unified e-commerce platform, ParamountShop.com. The site launched on Wednesday under the tagline “Where Products Are Paramount.”
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After previously offering products through a slew of its own shops, including an MTV, a Star Trek and a Yellowstone shop, in addition to a presence in retail stores, the company has now created one online shopping window for merchandise, namely more than 7,000 items representing more than 125 content brands.
That marks an evolution for the Hollywood conglomerate’s Consumer Products & Experiences division as it puts the spotlight on Paramount’s portfolio of franchises, which the management team of CEO Bob Bakish has been touting, including in a new brand campaign entitled “Popular is Paramount.” The step also fits into the company’s increasingly international mindset and adds another direct-to-consumer outlet to its arsenal. Like its Paramount+ streaming service, it showcases various brands under one umbrella, in this case with a focus on merchandise.
Paramount+ launched with the promise to provide “a mountain of entertainment” — in reference to the iconic mountain in the Paramount logo. Among the products on display on the site are the likes of Top Gun T-shirts and hats, the Star Trek Tridimensional Chess Set, Drunk History mugs and tumblers, a Yellowstone edition of Monopoly, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza cutting board, Paw Patrol plush toys and South Park cooking aprons and beach towels. The Star Trek tricorder, meanwhile, “drops later this spring,” the company said. (The tricorder is a fictional hand-held device used in the Star Trek universe to perform environmental scans, record data and analyze it.)
Paramount described the new shopping site as its “first global direct-to-consumer e-commerce site with products spanning its portfolio” of intellectual property (IP) with an “easy and thoughtful” customer interface.
“Paramount Shop plays a key role in Paramount’s multi-platform ecosystem as a new touchpoint for consumers to discover products reflecting the company’s popular content and culture-defining brands,” said Pam Kaufman, Paramount Global’s president and CEO, international markets and global consumer products & experiences in a statement. “It is so exciting to have a site that provides a seamless and engaging consumer experience that allows fans to shop across our portfolio of brands.”
Kaufman also told The Hollywood Reporter how the rebrand of the company from ViacomCBS to Paramount Global about a year ago helped create the new e-commerce opportunity. “Before, we just didn’t have the name or the umbrella for all of our IP.”
The site allows the company to ship to many countries in the world from day 1. Beyond the U.S., Paramount also offers localized versions of the site in Canada, the U.K. and Germany with plans to bring such localized sites to additional markets over the course of the year.
For Hollywood companies, consumer products have long been a way to deepen consumers’ engagement with and passion for key content brands and characters, while also making additional revenue. License Global’s list of top licensors by retail sales for 2021 was led by the Walt Disney Co. with $56.2 billion, with Paramount coming in 10th with $6 billion. Retail sales don’t equal content companies’ revenue though. Typically, they get a license fee from firms that want to use their characters for toys, clothing, housewares and the like along with a revenue cut for sold products.
