McDonald’s has teamed with fashion designer Alexander Wang to launch the ultimate picnic basket and lunch bag in connection with McDonald’s China. Specifically, the initiative was targeted to the Tmall Super Brand Day sale, an Alibaba marketing event. The limited-edition black, rattan picnic basket was designed with the McDonald’s menu in mind: they are large enough to carry two beverages and a Golden Bucket – a new chicken menu offering with packaging designed by Wang – shown below. Also featured are Wang-designed clutches inspired by the look and feel of the brand’s takeout bags. According to McDonald’s, all 300 picnic baskets (priced at RMB5,888 or $842) each, sold out in seconds, while the 30,000 lunch bags ($14 each) were sold in 10 minutes. “Chinese consumers have a strong appetite for innovation and new ideas,” said Christine Xu, CMO of McDonald’s China, adding that the country’s consumer boom makes it a hotbed for creative experimentation.
The frequency of brand collaborations is ratcheting up in China, according to Gartner L2, a global research and intelligence company. These collaborations help brands create key moments that are critical to breaking through the noise, said Danielle Bailey, Gartner L2’s managing vice president of Asia Pacific. “In the search for space in a crowded retail marketplace and the attention of insatiable, young consumers, collaborations spur often unlikely but effective bedfellows. Because young Chinese shoppers, who are the drivers of luxury consumption in the country, specifically cite collaborations as a key factor in their decisions to purchase luxury goods,” Bailey said, “burgers with a side of handbags makes sense to feed the hunger of millennials constantly on the hunt for the next new thing.”
