Snapchat launches Bitmoji merch and comic strips starring your avatar

Snapchat is doubling down on its biggest differentiator by turning its personalized avatar Bitmoji into a revenue stream and a new source of content. Snapchat is launching a Bitmoji merchandise store you can customize with you and your friends’ cartoonified faces, Bitmoji Stories comic strips featuring you and friends’ avatars in fun scenes, and a new Friendship profile that collect all the content you and a friend have saved from your Snap message thread.

The new features could help earn Snapchat money to reduce its still-massive quarterly losses, get Snap’s brand out in public, and give people new ways to spend more time on Snapchat when it’s otherwise been losing users.

The Bitmoji merchandise store opens Thursday in the US with $2 stickers, $15 coffee mugs, $16 t-shirts and notebooks, $27 sweatshirts and more that you can personalize by adding their Bitmoji, one their friends’, them and a friends’ playing together, or any two of their friends. Phone cases, towels, and pillows are also available. You can access the Bitmoji store from Snap Store in the Settings menu of Snapchat’s app. Snapchat first launched its Snap Store in Ghostface Chillah logo merchandise back in February to sell Dancing Hot Dog dolls, ghost pool floats, and puppy selfie filter shirts.

The new merch could help Snap show off its name and brand, reminding people to use the app since they can’t get the true Bitmoji anywhere else. Snap could also use the revenue given it lost $325 million last quarter and might have to take outside investment or be acquired as it may not break even before running out of cash.

Bitmoji Stories launch tomorrow in the US. A Snapchat spokesperson tells me “Bitmoji Stories will tell lighthearted stories in the form of short comic strips. Bitmoji Stories are created by Snap (from the Bitmoji content team), and will star the Snapchatter solo or with a friend.” They’re quite reminiscent of lifelike avatar startup Genies’ scenes. By creating a new form of Discover content in-house, Snapchat could draw more time and therefore more ad views out of its audience. And since there’s no outside publisher to pay, Snapchat can keep all the ad revenue.

And finally, today Snapchat begins globally rolling out its Friendship profiles. Accessible by clicking on a friend’s Bitmoji (or blank avatar if they haven’t made one) from Chat, Stories, Discover, or search, Snapchat says they “make it easy to find your favorite memories and the important information you’ve saved over time.” That includes, photos, videos, messages, and links saved from your otherwise ephemeral chats, plus a quick way to see that bestie on the Snap Map.

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