Katie Notopoulos / Business Insider
Recently at my local Walmart, I saw a massive display in the main aisle of the toy section: It featured a plastic toilet, about a foot tall, with a ghoulish head sticking out. For $44.95, I could be the proud owner of the Skibidi Toilet — complete with toilet-themed toys in the bowl.
And in case you were wondering: Yes, it makes a flushing noise.
If you've spent any time lately around someone who isn't old enough to drive, you've probably heard some utterance of the word "skibidi." I'll spare you the full summary of the Gen Alpha meme, but the short form is: It's a YouTube series about a dystopian battle of good and evil (the toilet guys are the heroes). My colleague Lindsay Dodgson describes it as "part 'Terminator,' part 'Bladerunner,' and obviously, part toilets." She says the series is actually good.
What's interesting to me is that this absurd toilet meme appears to be doing a robust business in the toy aisle of your local discount store.
I spoke with Dan Meyer, head of brands at Bonkers Toys, the company behind the flush. "Right away we noticed that it was exploding," Meyer said of the skibidi phenomenon online. Bonkers made a licensing deal and started pitching vendors on the toilet toy — an easy sell, he said. Bonkers started making prototypes of the toilet toy in early 2024 — and it's hit the shelves in time for the holiday season, a tight timeline.
"When we're pitching it to [retailers], we had enough data to see that in middle schools and elementary schools, the term skibidi was already a thing," Meyer said. Bonkers could point to the YouTube views the Skibidi Toilet series had racked up — its channel has more than 40 million followers — or how if they searched Instagram, they'd find "hundreds and hundreds" of people dressed in homemade Skibidi Toilet costumes.
Bonkers Toys, founded in 2017 in San Diego, has carved a niche for itself by licensing intellectual property from YouTube creators. Its first big toy was the giant "mystery egg" toy for Ryan's World. At the time, Ryan's World was one of the top channels on YouTube, a pioneer in the genre of "little kid opening toys."
Bonkers Toys
Bonkers' move into memes is in line with what retailers are trying to achieve, Blake Droesch, a senior retail analyst with BI sister company Emarketer, told me.
He said big box stores like Walmart are trying to respond quickly to online trends, especially for toys. They need to move fast to compete with viral shopping on the likes of Temu. "This environment has certainly created demand for manufacturers who can produce fast and cheap products that will serve this growing market," he said. "It's no different than fast fashion, but for toys. They respond quickly to viral moments and get products on the shelves while the trend is still hot."
The original Skibidi Toilet was the creation of animator Alexey Gerasimov, who made it for his YouTube channel DaFuq!?Boom!, which has 44.3 million subscribers. Gerasimov has partnered with Invisible Narratives, a company founded by Adam Goodman, the former president of DreamWorks SKG and Paramount Pictures who works with YouTube creators to help them make the jump to more traditional media, like movies and TV. It also helps them with licensing their brands for merchandise, like Skibidi's deal with Bonkers.
Merchandising, like with the toys from Bonkers Toys, is crucial to success for these new media brands, he said.
"We believe that young people don't want to pay for content anymore," Goodman told Business Insider. "Their parents pay for subscriptions, and the don't really go to movies the way that they used to — but they like buying stuff."
Skibidi Toilet is certainly not the first YouTube creation to enter into consumer merchandise. MrBeast sells chocolates and premade lunches along with Logan Paul and KSI, who make the popular drink Prime.
Bonkers Toys
Meyer wouldn't provide numbers on how many toilets they've sold, but so far, things are looking promising, he said. He said Bonkers' launch of a LankyBox-themed product about three years ago — which was another product centered on a YouTube creator — was one of the "biggest, most successful-selling brands in the boys' action aisle" at discounters, including Walmart. He said the Skibidi Toilet was outselling LankyBox by around double. (Walmart didn't respond to requests for comment on sales numbers.)
Right now, there are only a few Skibidi Toilet-theme products from Bonkers: individual action figures, mini-figures, plushes (aw, cute), and the aforementioned "mystery" toilet, which includes stickers, minifigures, and lanyards. But there will be more products for next year, Meyer said — including what every little boy and girl dreams of getting from Santa: a remote-controlled toilet bowl.
