Unicorn: How a Mythical Creature Became Our Best-Selling Trend — and Why Its Peak Came Four Months Before Starbucks

The first unicorn we ever sold was a hat for cats. 23 November 2012, two units, an inflatable horn by Archie McPhee that you pull over the head of a visibly unwilling house cat. Four years later the unicorn was the best-selling motif in our entire range — in 2016, roughly every eighth unit that left our warehouse was a unicorn. For this article we went through fourteen years of our own invoice data: well over 30'000 unicorns, revenue in the high six figures, around 170 different products, more than 20'000 customers. No other trend in this series comes close.

Where it started: the run-up

The unicorn did not have to be invented, it only had to be switched back on. The groundwork was in place: «My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic» had been running since 10 October 2010 and had found an adult audience — the «bronies» — that was never supposed to exist. The Lisa Frank pastel world of the nineties was back as nostalgia. And in Silicon Valley, investor Aileen Lee gave the word a second meaning on 2 November 2013: in her TechCrunch piece «Welcome To The Unicorn Club» she labelled startups valued above a billion dollars «unicorns» — all 39 of them at the time. From then on the creature stood for the nursery and the capital market at once.

Then three triggers arrived in quick succession. In January 2015 Lush put the «Unicorn Horn» bubble bar into its Valentine's range, a pastel horn for the bathtub. On 17 June 2015 the Unicode Consortium released Unicode 8.0 — including the unicorn emoji U+1F984, which reached iPhones with iOS 9.1 in October 2015. And in June 2016 food stylist Adeline Waugh posted pastel-swirled toast on Instagram, which her followers christened «unicorn toast». From that moment the unicorn was no longer a character but a colour palette: anything that shimmered in pastels was allowed to use the name.

How it reached us: August 2015

In our numbers the hype has an exact starting date, and it is not the one pop culture remembers. July 2015: a few dozen unicorn items sold. August 2015: thirteen times as many. That is not a market moving, that is one single product — more than ninety-five per cent of them were a small pastel night light by the British gift brand SMOKO, which we had first sold on 3 June 2015. By the time the last one went out on 8 June 2022, we had sold more than five thousand of them. It remains the best-selling unicorn product we have ever had.

So 2015 was not a trend, it was a hit. The trend proper began in spring 2016, when the number of unicorn products in our range grew from 10 to 24 and sales moved beyond the night light: slippers, a pool float, a onesie, a gin liqueur, heat cushions. The slippers alone — SMOKO again, CHF 49.95 — sold more than three thousand times in 2016.

The peak was December 2016, not April 2017

This is where the reconstruction gets interesting, because our data contradicts the international narrative. In the usual telling, the unicorn hype peaks with the Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino, sold for five days from 19 to 23 April 2017 and good for some 155'000 Instagram posts. In our warehouse the tide had already gone out: April 2017 brought less than half the units of April 2016.

Our peak sits four months earlier, and its trigger has a German name. On 1 November 2016 Ritter Sport released a limited-edition unicorn chocolate bar; it sold out in under 20 hours, changed hands on eBay for up to ten times its price, and on 7 November the manufacturer announced a second run of 150'000 bars — on a line that produces around 2'000 bars an hour. Our sales exploded in exactly those weeks: December 2016 became the strongest month any trend has ever had in our history. The German-speaking world had its unicorn moment in the 2016 Christmas season, and it happened not in a coffee cup but under the tree.

Why it got all of us

The explanations circulating in the press in 2017 hold up surprisingly well. Trend expert Daniel Levine told Refinery29 that three ingredients had to come together: a culturally prepared motif, celebrity amplification and visual fitness for social media — and soberly filed the unicorn as «this year's pumpkin spice». Media scholar Hannah Dick pointed to platform logic in the same piece: Instagram and Snapchat reward colour. And brand strategist Jess Weiner read the unicorn as a self-description — rare, powerful, imaginary.

Timing helped. 2016 was politically a year of bad news, and a motif that means nothing beyond friendliness was in demand. Between August 2016 and July 2017 Pinterest recorded roughly 400 per cent more searches for «unicorn food» and over 460 per cent more for «unicorn makeup».

How the industry reacted — and how we did

From 2017 there was nothing that did not exist in unicorn form: Too Faced sold a «Unicorn Tears» lipstick, Firebox a glittering gin liqueur of the same name, Moschino showed a My Little Pony capsule at Milan Fashion Week, Paris Hilton launched a «Unicorn Mist». Our range followed that logic with precisely the delay that costs retailers so dearly.

The decisive row is 2018. Sales had fallen to a third of the previous year — and yet that was the year we carried more unicorns than ever before or since: 147 products. That is the purchasing lag in its purest form: you order what sold last year, it arrives a year later, and it never sells at all. Anyone wondering why trend goods die in the warehouse should look at the ordering rhythm, not at the customers.

Last chance: the final unicorns of the hype era

• Storyboard Uni Clips — in the range since 2015, exactly one set left.
• Knit Your Own Unicorn Kit — down from CHF 24.95 to 9.95, seven left.
• Unicorn Poop Stuffed Scarf — plush in rainbow colours, as 2016 as it gets.
• Warmies Cozy Plush Sparkly Pink Unicorn — the motif in its most useful form.
• Giant Unicorn Candle — three left, then never again.

What stayed, what went

From 2018 the market tipped: oversaturated, copied everywhere, and attention moved on to the mermaid, then to the llama. That, too, is in our numbers — in its best year, 2020, the llama did not reach a tenth of the unicorn year 2016. Flamingo, sloth, dachshund, axolotl and capybara all stay below that. Since the unicorn, no trend in our range has had that force again — probably because attention now spreads across more, smaller waves.

What is left in the warehouse mirrors that curve precisely: we still list 179 unicorn products, 145 of them at zero stock. 34 are still available.

How the trend lives today

And then, in August 2026, something happened that adds a twist to the story: Starbucks brought the Unicorn Frappuccino back for two days, 15 and 16 August. More than two million drinks were sold, the Saturday was the biggest sales Saturday in company history according to CEO Brian Niccol, and foot traffic ran 44 per cent above the daily average according to analytics firm Placer.ai. Nine years after the original, the nostalgia was bigger than the hype had ever been.

Little of that reached us — a few dozen units in all of 2026. But the motif is not dead, it has simply grown up and retreated to the children's room: we bought the two eraser sets below fresh in autumn 2025, with no trend argument attached. And the true survivor is a ceramic bowl. The Unicorn Ramen Bowl entered the range on 31 July 2017, mid-hype, has sold more than three hundred times since, most recently in mid-August 2026 — and still sits in the warehouse in triple digits. At that rate we will be done in thirty years. The unicorn wipes, first sold in May 2016, went out over the counter yesterday.

What remains: the unicorn after the hype

• Unicorn Ramen Bowl — the trophy of this series. Down from CHF 34.95 to 9.95, and still plenty in stock.
• Unicorn Wipes — ten years in the range and still selling.
• Unicorn Erasers — bought new in 2025. In a pencil case a unicorn is just a unicorn.
• Unicorn Donut Eraser — also new, also without the hype premium.
• Inflatable Evil Unicorn Horn for Cats — the devil version of the cat horn that started it all in 2012. The cat still disagrees.

Sources

• Own analysis of our complete invoice history from October 2008 to August 2026; all line items containing «Einhorn» or «Unicorn» in the product name. We report shares and ratios, not absolute revenue figures.
• Aileen Lee, «Welcome To The Unicorn Club», TechCrunch, 2 November 2013: TechCrunch
• Unicode 8.0 with unicorn emoji U+1F984, 17 June 2015: Unicode blog · Emojipedia
• Adeline Waugh and «unicorn toast», June 2016; Pinterest search data 2016/17: Wikipedia, «Unicorn trend»
• Ritter Sport unicorn chocolate, second run of 150'000 bars, 7 November 2016: Ritter Sport blog · Horizont
• Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino, 19–23 April 2017: Wikipedia · Marketing Dive
• Cultural context with Daniel Levine, Hannah Dick and Jess Weiner: Refinery29, May 2017
• Return of the Unicorn Frappuccino, 15/16 August 2026, over 2m drinks: Nation's Restaurant News
• «My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic», premiere 10 October 2010: Wikipedia

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