Anime entertainment company Crunchyroll is partnering with Walmart on a new retail experience.
The company, which was acquired by Sony in 2020 for $1.2 billion, is best known as an anime content streaming service and boasts more than 12 million paying users. But the bulk of the company’s business is commerce. The company operates an online store for all things anime and manga, and has launched exclusive merchandise sales and experiences over the years.
Now the company is hoping to reach more anime fans with a four-foot pod called Crunchyroll Fan Shop. The pods will soon be rolled out to more than 2,400 stores selling products such as DVDs, figures and records. The company also plans to sell gift card subscriptions to the service in a new effort to further increase streaming numbers.
While commerce has been part of Crunchyroll’s business for several years, Mitchell Berger, the company’s senior vice president of global commerce, said this is entirely new territory. “We’ve never done anything like this before in retail,” he said. While Crunchyroll has previously partnered with retailers and online shops for individual products, it has never launched its own branded store-in-store concept on this scale.
Berger said the partnership came about because Walmart was looking for a partner to collaborate on the anime experience. “It was a great opportunity that they recognized,” he said. Together they put together the in-store pod concept and came up with products based on trending programming and overall demand data from Walmart.
Given the passionate nature of the anime community, which is a $20 billion industry according to Bloomberg, Berger said the design and feel of the pods is paramount. The space “needs to feel like Crunchyroll,” he says.
According to Brad Jashinsky, retail director analyst at Gartner, this isn’t necessarily a new type of partnership for Walmart. The retail giant last year announced a partnership with Netflix to set up physical hubs in more than 2,000 stores selling merchandise and gift cards. “This feels like a similar idea,” Jasinski said.
But what Crunchyroll can benefit from is its specificity. Currently with more than 247 million paid members, Netflix is a broad-based streaming company that offers programming across multiple genres. In contrast, Crunchyroll is focused on anime and manga and is “much more focused,” Jasinski said.
And for Walmart, focusing on anime could attract younger shoppers. According to CBR, Gen Z has the most anime fans compared to all other generations. “As anime grows around the world, it tends to grow with younger audiences,” Jasinski said.
In many ways, this partnership is a natural extension of our media business. “This appears to be the path many successful media franchises have anticipated,” Forrester vice president and principal analyst Sucharita Kodali wrote in an email to Modern Retail. “Once their media is successful, they typically expand to consumer products such as licensed apparel, school supplies, and household products.”
Kodari sees this kind of IP partnership in major stores as the future. “It’s like Barbie dolls and Disney movies. Items like socks with characters on them are easier to sell than generic items with unknown brands,” she wrote. “Crunchyroll is more than just a streaming service. They are media companies like Marvel and Disney. ”
Berger said the plan is to test these arrangements through 2024 to determine what happens next. For him, he is most excited about the possibility of selling subscription gifts cards. This is something the service has never done before. “We think it’s an interesting concept…we’re really looking forward to seeing how it develops,” he said.
While retailers like Best Buy are starting to move away from entertainment products like DVDs, players like Crunchroll are seeing potential in reaching their fan bases directly. And that’s especially true in the anime world.
“For anime fans, once you’re a fan, it’s a lifestyle,” he said. “We don’t just offer streaming; [platform] But it also gives them an opportunity to express their fandom. ”