Sticki Rolls built its following entirely on YouTube through unboxing videos and sticker trading hauls. This month, its marketing team is testing whether that following will travel from a screen into a nail salon in downtown Manhattan on August 7 and 8.

Michelle Wong is SVP of Global Marketing at Jazwares, where she works out of the company’s Los Angeles offices overseeing marketing across its portfolio, from its own Squishmallows franchise to licensed and distributor brands including Sticki Rolls. Of that roster, she says Sticki Rolls sits apart. “It is just such a fantastic product and brand and such an exciting audience to be speaking to that it’s definitely a favorite of mine,” she says.

Photo: Michelle Wong

Sticki Rolls launched in 2024 and grew through creator-led YouTube content before expanding into more than 60 countries and surpassing a billion views on the platform, according to the company. Its audience skews toward Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z, a group Michelle describes as living without much separation between their online and offline lives.

That following was built by Sticki Rolls Ambassadors Anna Altamirano and Erin Degan, the artists behind the original collection. “Anna and Erin have done an incredible job cultivating this fandom online,” Michelle says. It is that existing fandom that she says prompted the pop-up. “We’re trying to give more back to our community.”

Photo: Anna Altamirano & Erin Degan

The Pop-Up Answers A Community Request

Michelle describes the Chillhouse activation as a collaborative decision with the Sticki Rolls team, not a response to any specific business problem. “We know how meaningful it is to be able to interact with anything that you love in real life,” she says. “We felt it was a real privilege to bring this into a physical space.”

Internally, Michelle says the idea moved through Jazwares without resistance. “We got really lucky because people weren’t pushing back,” she says. “It almost was like, why haven’t we done this already?” She adds that the company already expects to follow with more activations.

That speed was also possible because the product itself was not the bottleneck. “The product path was there, so we weren’t having to wait on certain timing, on availability,” Michelle says, crediting a clearly defined brand for making execution straightforward. “It makes it very easy to ideate and get creative.”

The pop-up runs August 7 and 8 at Chillhouse in SoHo, timed to a Target retail push for the brand’s Series 3 line and the debut of Sticki Mates, a bag-charm format that extends the collectible line beyond its original sticker bracelets, according to background material shared for this story.

Photo: Series 3 collection

A Nail Salon, Not A Toy Aisle, Becomes The Test Site

Michelle says the venue was chosen to feel unfamiliar rather than expected, pointing to overlap between the brand’s fashion and beauty affinities and Chillhouse’s own positioning. “We wanted to do something that was a little unexpected,” she says. “Chillhouse is incredibly trend forward and contemporary, and it just felt like a really nice cohesive fit.”

Translating a sticker product onto a manicure proved to be the hardest piece to finalize. “The nail piece was tricky. Do we use the stickers on the nails? I’m not a nail tech, so I don’t know what’s professional,” Michelle says. The team worked with Chillhouse to make the format feel true to a manicure rather than a novelty add-on.

For Anna, the format was a logical extension of what she and Erin already do with the brand’s product off camera. “Our fans know that we like to decorate everything in Sticki Rolls: water bottles, skateboards, my treehouse, an ice cream truck, a NY taxi, and of course, a real school bus,” she says. “So when Sticki Rolls said they wanted to do a salon takeover pop-up at Chillhouse, it made sense to us to use the stickers to glam up nails.”

The activation includes themed manicures, a “Sticki Café” serving branded drinks, bracelet-making, an early look at Sticki Mates, and a meet-and-greet with Anna and Erin.

Fan Input Already Shapes What Sticki Rolls Sells

The brand’s product decisions run through its audience before they run through Jazwares. “We provide design ideas for the stickers and for some of the bracelet bead designs,” Michelle says. “Some sticker designs are inspired by the artwork we receive from our fans. We also conduct community polls on the Sticki Rolls YouTube channel and ask fans what characters and licenses they want to collect.”

That loop extends to what fans bring back. “We’ve done several in-store meet-and-greets and several hundred fans have shown up,” Erin says. “They bring amazing handmade artwork and even recreated our characters from clay.”

Michelle ties that dynamic to why the brand’s own channels read less like a corporate account and more like a creator’s. She pushes back on the usual framing for it. “People throw around authenticity a lot,” she says. “But I think this is really more about a genuine sort of need and desire for self-expression.”

For Anna And Erin, Meeting Fans In Person Reverses The Camera’s Rules

For the two creators, the pop-up flips which format feels more exposed. “It’s actually more intimidating than filming because there’s no editing. There’s no retake,” Anna says. Erin describes the opposite reaction: “I am more relaxed meeting fans in person than in filming. When you’re meeting people in person, you can just be yourself.”

What in-person contact offers that a video cannot, according to Erin, is a two-way exchange. “A video is one-way. People can watch you. Meeting someone in person lets you actually hear their story,” she says. “That’s one of the things YouTube can’t replace.” Anna frames the same shift around evidence: online she sees view counts and comments; in person, “kids smiling, wearing your bracelets and showing you sticker collections they’ve spent months building.”

That contact has not changed how fans categorize them, Erin says. “I don’t think our fans see us as characters like actors in a TV show,” she says. “In our videos we’re authentically ourselves.” Anna describes the relationship in more personal terms: “I think our fans see us as older sisters and friends they spend time with every week.”

Jazwares Is Measuring The Event On Emotion, Not Just Impressions

Michelle says the pop-up will be judged on social engagement and chatter, the standard measures for an activation designed to be shared. But she names a second, less conventional benchmark. “I am using the general excitement of our girls as a measure of success,” she says.

She argues that emotional response outlasts a single event. “If you’re able to really connect with your audience on that kind of emotional level, that stays with you for a very long time, and it has a real impact on how you feel about a brand,” Michelle says.

That framing informs how she advises other marketers weighing a similar handoff of creative control. “My advice is always to just try, because you never know what’s going to stick, and if it doesn’t stick, it’s not that bad,” she says. In her view, the more common failure is a misplaced metric, not a weak idea: “Sometimes the mistake is thinking too much about a hard metric versus how you’re going to make an impact on the person that’s coming to see you.”

More Pop-Ups Are Already On The Calendar

Michelle frames the Chillhouse activation as the first test of a channel Jazwares intends to keep using, independent of how this particular weekend performs. “Any execution, there’s always lessons learned,” she says. “I know this isn’t going to be the last, for sure. There’s so much more to be done and more people to connect with.”

That expansion sits alongside the brand’s retail push into Target and the rollout of the Sticki Mates format, positioning the pop-up as one part of a broader push beyond YouTube rather than a standalone event.

Anna describes the moment in similar terms, treating the pop-up as a starting point rather than a destination. “We’re just getting started,” she says. “We’d love to create even more products, more experiences, and maybe even bigger ways for our community to meet in person.”

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