Industry: Retail
Sideshow is the global leader in pop culture collectibles, specializing in high-end, licensed, and original collectible products.
Founded in 1994, the brand has grown from creating toy prototypes to solidifying itself as a beloved collectible manufacturer and distributor, serving a global community of film, television, and comic book fans.
Products
With a lean marketing team, an audience of diverse, dedicated fandoms, and dozens of product drops every month, Sideshow needed to deliver marketing campaigns that were fast, relevant, and effortless to execute.
But demanding campaign-building processes were slowing things down. Each launch required new content, audience segmentation, and journey building, with multiple steps and collaborators involved. These bottlenecks made it difficult to launch campaigns quickly, limiting Sideshow’s ability to react to real-time opportunities.
To keep pace with demand and personalize its messages across channels — without adding complexity — Sideshow adopted Affinity, Bloomreach’s autonomous marketing solution.
With Affinity, Sideshow unlocked AI-powered campaign execution that acts on user prompts in real time — delivering speed, creativity, and revenue.
By simply prompting Affinity with a business objective — like “promote Star Wars collectibles this week” — our agentic AI-powered platform identifies unique campaign opportunities, generates the right campaign scenarios, conditions, and audience segments, and designs revenue-driving customer journeys.
This has revolutionized Sideshow’s marketing and opened up new ways to engage with its audience, including key use cases like:
“We were going from creating basically a new campaign once a week to completely automated and lightning-fast workflows,” explained Dennis Bower, Brand Manager at Sideshow. “It’s amplified our entire operation and is a huge timesaver.”
With Affinity, we can go from campaign idea to launch in under 15 minutes. That speed makes a real difference in our competitive market, where every minute our campaigns wait is a big deal. Now, I don’t have to wait around — I can plug a campaign concept into Affinity and just go, which saves a ton of valuable time.
In just a few weeks of using Affinity, Sideshow began to see a meaningful shift in both efficiency and performance.
“With Affinity, we can go from campaign idea to launch in under 15 minutes,” Bower explained. “That speed makes a real difference in our competitive market.”
These expedited workflows have produced incredible results. Sideshow has seen a 2x increase in value per email delivered, with 13.9% of email revenue directed attributed to our platform — including $10k in revenue from a single Affinity-powered campaign.
Affinity has also helped Sideshow streamline complex legacy campaigns. Previously, the team had to manage over 200 separate post-purchase email scenarios to deliver product assembly instructions — a manual and time-consuming process. With Affinity, that entire operation is now automated, with AI sending the right instructions to the right customers as soon as they make a purchase.
“With Affinity, we condensed over 200 individual product scenarios into one streamlined, dynamic campaign,” Bowers said. “It saved our team countless hours.”
By automating key workflows, accelerating speed to market, and personalizing campaigns at scale, Affinity has empowered Sideshow’s team to move faster, test bolder ideas, and focus more time on the creative strategies their fans love.
We know your time is valuable, so let’s cut to the chase.
This isn’t your typical sales demo; it’s a conversation designed to help you make an informed decision about Autonomous Marketing, Autonomous Search or Conversational Shopping. We’ll discuss your challenges, explore potential solutions, and see if Bloomreach aligns with your goals.
Schedule a Time to Connect
