Warner Bros plans fashion makeover for Tweety Pie

Warner Bros Consumer Products is relaunching Looney Tune’s Tweety Pie with the aim of repositioning the character as a fashion icon.

The relaunch will include a range of clothing, which will be rolled out in the UK and the US over the next year. Fashion designer and US socialite Nicky Hilton is helping to design the clothes. There will also be a range of accessories and bags featuring the yellow bird character.

The company will be collaborating with Dolce & Gabbana, which has worked with Warner Bros in the past.

The strategy is being rolled out in two stages over the next year. The first phase, which will break later this year, will target young adults, mainly women, and older teenagers. The second part of the campaign will break next year and will target the character’s core market of four- to nine-year-old girls.

The company says the plan to revitalise Tweety is in response to consumer demand. Warner Bros Consumer Products director of business development David Binnie says: “There is an opportunity to position Tweety as a fashion icon. We’re using couture designers in various countries to design lines for Tweety.

“Initially we are not going to target the default, natural consumer for Tweety as we need to make the character aspirational. We’re targeting younger women with these fashion-led lines.”

Binnie explains that Tweety Pie has remained very popular in the rest of Europe but has lost some ground in the UK since shows featuring the character have stopped being aired. He adds that in the late 1990s Tweety was the biggest intellectual property in the UK for Warner Bros, with retail sales at the time of about &£120m.