00:00Nobody can prove if a vase sold out or flopped, and that's exactly why commentary channels fell
00:04for the wrong argument. Only thing I could afford right now is a Vavette journal. While online
00:09critics yelled about $1,200 jackets, Kai, one of the world's biggest streamers, was testing a whole
00:13new streamer blueprint live from Fashion Week. And today on What's Trending, we're breaking down
00:18what everyone's missing inside this luxury live stream Buy As You See It event that could change
00:23the game for streamers forever. A lot of things are about to go sold out. Pause right here. You
00:29know, that's not Poppy on the runway. That's Poppy next to the runway. Official brand partner,
00:34hospitality, and behind the scenes, they called it On Cloud Kai. And that is part of what everyone's
00:39missing. Up until now, streamers had two options. Drop $40 hoodies to chat or sit front row at someone
00:45else's fashion show. But Kai, he just built a third option. You guys are representing something brand
00:51new or birth of a new child. When you walk that runway, feel it, own it, hear the music, feel
00:57the
00:57clothes, and blow minds away. Kai treated New York Fashion Week like a Twitch live stream,
01:02where chat is the front row, the runway is the content, and that Buy As You See It button
01:07is the cash register. That's where Poppy comes in. Because they don't own a piece of a bay,
01:12they just sponsored the experience. In return, the beverage brand is able to ride the engagement
01:17wave and subsidize the overhead. Meaning Poppy stocks the fridge, gets exclusive behind-the-scenes
01:23content with creators, captures the TikTok halo, and Kai gets his production costs covered.
01:28Think Coachella and Red Bull. The popular energy drink doesn't own the music festival. They just
01:33pay to be the drink everyone's holding in social media photos. And that matters because Lower
01:38Manhattan during Fashion Week, including venue, security, staff, and production, is insanely
01:43expensive. So for Kai, every activation like this is one less dollar from his own pocket and 0%
01:49given away in his business. What'd you spend on this first Vivette collection to get this thing
01:54off the ground? Oh my gosh. A lot more than I intended. In short, Kai didn't sell company
01:58stock or equity. He sold access to the room. Yeah. So I own it 100%. And once he had the
02:05world
02:05watching live, he let chat buy the runway items the exact second they dropped. Every selected individual
02:11fits the storyline in the first collection perfectly. So when fancy Duke Dennis walk in the
02:16$1,200 jacket critics are complaining about, they can click instantly to buy the item the second
02:21they see him walk across the stage. No tab switch. No link in description. And that's the entire cheat
02:27code here. Converting raw hype into instant checkouts before the next look even hits the runway. But a
02:32system like that only works if you have massive instant attention. And that's why Kai didn't hire agency
02:37models. He booked a lineup of internet heavyweights. Because in digital marketing, every creator is its own
02:43distribution channel. And Kai knows traditional models can walk a runway, but they don't convert
02:48cells. So by filling the stage with top streamers, Kai is able to stack multiple massive fanbases into
02:54one live audience, converting raw clout into instant cells, which the live stream reportedly did.
03:00According to stream charts, the show averaged nearly 100,000 live viewers, all able to shop the second
03:05they see the new luxury line. Which brings us to the real breakdown. Because if the machine appears to be
03:10engineered perfectly, why are all the items still available online? Well, first you have to see the
03:15trap top creator's face. Internet audiences are conditioned to expect affordable merch from their
03:20favorite streamers, especially when their audience is primarily made up of 12 to 24 year olds. So when
03:25Kai dropped pieces ranging from a $20 journal, all the way up to a $1,195 raglan jacket, the collection's
03:32most expensive piece, comments like this one started flooding in. And that take wasn't unique. Across the
03:38comments, people read it the same way. A young streamer was pricing out the very chat that built
03:43him. But here's what the internet missed. Kai wasn't making standard streamer merch. He stepped
03:48away from streaming for nine months to build this out, including working directly with Taylors in
03:52Italy.
03:52Hmm, I'm sure people were interested. Like, oh, we'll buy in.
03:56We want to, we heard your story. We want to get on this before we go.
03:59Right.
03:59And I was like, nah, I was like, I can do this by myself.
04:02And if you look at his website, it seems the $20 journal is for his Twitch chat, with
04:07the higher tier prices aimed at building a real fashion enterprise, the kind of asset
04:11that still has value if he's not live streaming in 10 years. Now, to be fair to the chat that's
04:17mad about this, they're not wrong to fill the sticker shock. Nobody prepared them for a
04:21founder trying to build the next Gucci instead of a merch table. And that's not chat being
04:25cheap. That's chat reacting to exactly how a decade of streamer merch trained them to react.
04:30But none of that backlash actually answers the question we started with. Because if the hype was
04:35real, why hasn't everything sold out? And then some jeans going for almost $1,000? No wonder why
04:41no item has been sold out. Well, first, you have to understand that they is privately owned and
04:46there are no public financial ledgers to check. What we actually have is two competing narratives.
04:51First of all, one of the biggest misconceptions of social media is that people fall into the trap
04:55of assuming that if you have viewership or if you have access to an audience, that you can sell
04:59them anything you like. Social media is calling it a flop. And Kai is reportedly on his own stream
05:04saying that pieces are moving fast. And right now, digital culture has been trained by Supreme Drops
05:09to think that if a whole site doesn't sell out in 30 seconds, it's a failure. But a $1,200
05:14jacket
05:15doesn't need a stampede. It needs a small number of high value buyers. And even if a small portion of
05:20those live viewers bought in, it creates solid extra profit on a show that's already paid for by sponsors.
05:26That's why focusing strictly on the sellout time misses the bigger picture. Historically,
05:31creators face two options. Stay small selling affordable merch and landing brand deals or give
05:36up company equity to raise cash for a real business. Kai just demonstrated a third path. Let corporate
05:42sponsors fund the stage, keep 100% ownership, and use the live stream as the storefront. So whether
05:49Vevey sold 50 jackets or 5,000, that execution model is what we see creators and major corporations
05:56doing in the future.
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