Chipotle has a history of supercharging their superfans, making them feel seen, heard and celebrated with content, events, and limited edition merch - like our Chipotle Car Napkin Holder and Lemonade-Scented “Water” Cup Candle.
But our biggest event of the year is always Boorito… AKA Halloween. Since 2000, Boorito has been one of Chipotle’s longest running traditions, inviting fans to get in costume for the chance to claim discounted burritos in restaurant on Halloween. Our objective was simple: raise Boorito awareness and help drive sales through our 2024 Campaign.
In 2022, we hopped on the viral “Spirit Halloween costume” meme trend, posting a fake ‘Chipotle Fork’ costume. Our audience loved it.
We did it again in 2023. This time meme-ing a ‘Chipotle Napkin’ costume which fans loved even more.
Going into its 24th year, we knew we had to go even bigger to remain fresh and break through in culture.
After two consecutive years of our Spirit Halloween meme being a top performer amongst our target audiences and followers, we took fan comments and demands as our creative brief and did the only thing we could: made them real.
But to do that, we knew we had to work with the right partner. So we created a partnership with Spirit Halloween - Gen Z’s favorite Halloween brand - to take our meme costumes off the feed and into the world.
Introducing the official Chipotle Boorito Costume Collection.
The full collection included our fan-favorite Fork and Napkin costumes and expanded to the full Boorito Collection - including the Chipotle Water Cup, Chipotle To-Go Bag, and of course, Chipotle Burrito.
We manufactured a Limited Edition run of each costume. These were sold on Spirit Halloween’s official site and in select Spirit Halloween stores nationwide.
We teased the collaboration by leaning into the cultural meme of Spirit Halloween swooping in to take over buildings in the lead up to Halloween, creating a social-first CGI teaser showing a Spirit Halloween banner falling into place on a Chipotle restaurant.
Then to launch, we took the costumes into the world, filming voyeuristic moments of our costumes being worn in Chipotle restaurants and out in the world. Both the tease and launch content went viral with fans and the press - including being played on CNN and Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel.
Beyond owned social, we worked with iconic creators to bring the story to life. We transformed “tatted like a Chipotle bag” Rob Rausch from Love Island into a Chipotle Bag, gave JaneMukbangs the chance to dress up like a burrito while eating a burrito, and let Chipotle Napkins dance in the wind on the observation deck of the the Empire State Building in an epic collab with their iconic TikTok account.
The results were scary good. The campaign was the #1 highest-value PR campaign in brand history, earning 9.2B+ Press Impressions, 68M+ Owned Impressions and 3.4M+ Owned Engagements
But most importantly, it broke through in culture.
The Burrito Costume not only sold out six weeks before Halloween, but it was the 11th most searched costume nationwide according to Google’s Frightgeist Tracker.
