“The Original BRO” had some merchandising ideas that never came to fruition during his run in WWE.
Matt Riddle recently appeared as a guest on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet for an in-depth interview, during which he recalled trying to convince WWE for months to create “4:20” related merchandise to go along with his persona.
“Dude, it took a lot of convincing (for WWE to create 4:20 merchandise),” Riddle said. “But, I’ll tell you this, they’re not mad about it. They made quite a pretty penny on it and so did I and so did Randy (Orton) I would imagine. But, yeah, we were trying for months and months and then 4:20 came up, and now if you know Randy, Randy doesn’t like to advertise anything. Randy does his job and that’s his job. Unless he wants to do something, he’s not gonna do it, which, that’s why Randy’s so cool.”
Riddle continued, “So, we want this 4:20 shirt. WWE hits us up on 4/19, they go, ‘Randy, Riddle, we’re gonna do an RK-Bro 4:20 shirt. We’re only going to do a limited release, one day only.’ Alright, they could’ve told us any other shirt, whatever. I probably would have shared it. Randy wouldn’t have shared it. Me and Randy texted each other separately from then and we go, ‘We’re sharing the hell out of this shirt. We are getting this over. We need this to sell.’ We wanted it, we needed it, we finally got what we wanted. We needed to make this happen. We got to let them know how much money there is, and literally, not even 16 hours into 4:20, we got a call. They’re like, ‘Oh, we’re going to keep the shirt going. We’re just gonna keep it going’ and even after Randy left because of his injury, they had the Bro 4:20 shirt which sold like hotcakes and the Bro 4:20 hats and everything else.”
Check out the complete interview at Apple.com. H/T to POSTWrestling.com for transcribing the above quotes.
