Inside Kendra Scott’s “Bachelor Live” sponsorship

As anyone who has ever been to a sorority house on a Monday night knows, ABC’s The Bachelor franchise sunk its teeth into America’s collegiate women many seasons ago.

And, as anyone who followed the #BamaRush trend on TikTok knows, sorority members tend to wear a lot of jewelry from Kendra Scott.

Kendra Scott’s marketing team is well aware of how its average customer spends their Monday night. “Our customers love The Bachelor and The Bachelorette,” Kellyann Miller, Kendra Scott’s director of brand marketing, told Marketing Brew. That’s partly why, when MagicSpace—the company that produces The Bachelor Live on Stage—approached Kendra Scott with a sponsorship opportunity, the team jumped at the chance.

If you haven’t been sucked into the vortex that is this franchise, Bachelor Live is basically an IRL version of the show that travels to different cities. Hosted by ex-Bachelorette Becca Kufrin, women are “hand-picked from the audience” to compete for a former Bachelorette contestant’s heart. This year’s Bachelor Live kicks off in March.

“Our customer loves it—when they see that Bachelor Live is coming to their town, we really do think that our Kendra customer is there, and so we want to meet them where they are,” Miller told us, adding that the stops on the tour are in core markets, many with Kendra Scott retail stores. “It’s a fantastic marketing opportunity for us.”

Plus, The Bachelor franchise is basically an influencer factory, and all of the bachelors at these live events are contestants from previous seasons with sizable followings. Miller described this as “a cherry on top” of an already fitting sponsorship.

“We were like, ‘Okay, let’s get creative, and let’s start nourishing these relationships,’” she said.

The deets

Miller told us that influencer partnerships are a “very large” piece of Kendra Scott’s marketing efforts, citing its Gems campus ambassador program as an example. This sponsorship serves, in part, as an extension of the brand’s influencer strategy.

Kendra Scott is paying a sponsorship fee, but declined to share specifics with Marketing Brew. ABC did not respond to requests for details. As part of the deal, Miller said Kufrin and all of the onstage bachelors will sport Kendra Scott jewelry (the brand rolled out a men’s line, called Scott Bros., last year) during Bachelor Live events and photo shoots.

Additionally, the winner of each live show will get some free Kendra Scott bling to take home.

The sponsorship also includes in-store meet and greets, where that night’s bachelor heads to a Kendra Scott store near that night’s Bachelor Live show to meet fans beforehand. That way, Miller said, people have the opportunity to meet the star of the show before attending—while surrounded by Kendra Scott jewelry, of course.

When each bachelor does a meet and greet event, Miller said he’ll post about it and tag Kendra Scott on social. Kufrin is tagging Kendra Scott as well whenever she announces info about Bachelor Live on social.

The beginning of a beautiful…ambassadorship?

While Bachelor Live and meet and greets are IRL events, the social aspect of the sponsorship is important for Kendra Scott, too, considering the brand’s long history with the show on social media.

For example, when the show airs, Miller told us Kendra Scott’s social team will sometimes post Instagram Story polls asking which Kendra Scott earrings viewers would wear to that night’s rose ceremony or group date.

Engagement on that type of Bachelor and Bachelorette-related social media content is “through the roof,” Miller said, though she declined to provide specifics.

This isn’t Kendra’s first rodeo with contestants from the show. The brand said it has worked with contestants-turned-influencers like Katie Morton, Mike Johnson, Ben Higgins, and Pieper James, as well as with Kufrin herself, before this sponsorship even began.

Miller said that Mike Johnson’s (a former Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise star) influencer work for the brand has given Kendra Scott over 880K+ social impressions across different platforms.

So, she says she hopes the partnerships she’s forming as part of Bachelor Live don’t stop when the tour ends, outlining how her marketing team plans to court the men participating going forward.

“We have an amazing program called Kendra Gives Back, where you can host an event and 20% of the proceeds go back to a charity organization of your choice,” Miller told us, adding that other Bachelor alums, like Mike Johnson, have hosted these events in the past.