Bluey, Bingo, Bandit, and Chilli. They’re the family of animated dogs from Queensland, Australia, that’s turned into an absolute global phenomenon. “Bluey” was the most-streamed show in the United States in 2024 and the first half of 2025. During that 18-month period, the show saw more than 80 billion minutes streamed, and it’s Nicki Sheard’s job as CEO of BBC Studios’ Brands and Licensing to bring Bluey and her family to life outside of the show. That includes everything from Bluey games, toys, designer sneakers, social media, YouTube, a place in Disney Parks (coming in 2026!), and much more.
Nicki Sheard: Fruit Flies & The Pivot
Sheard almost had an entirely different professional life. She spent her early years on a farm. As a young student, she excelled in science. “At my school, if you were good at science. They suggested you were a scientist, so that was kind of plan A.” She graduated from Oxford and was two years into pursuing a PhD at Harvard (which involved dissecting lots of fruit flies), when she began to have her doubts.
“Wow, I really don’t like this,” Sheard recalls. She had no plan B and no job waiting, but she left Harvard and returned home. “I remember sitting on the plane crying. I think something in me must have just gone, ‘there has to be more than this’.” Her parents were concerned, but supportive.
From Lab Coats to the Cool Kids’ Table
In London, Sheard found middle ground at Procter & Gamble, joining as a research scientist. “It was the days when more is more, it was like, don’t have two stripes in your toothpaste. Have three!”
But while in the lab one day, she spotted “this cool group of people with wheelie suitcases and suits” and learned they were the brand managers who “run the show.” Again, she listened to her gut. She went to her boss to make her case for switching departments, a rarity at that time. They gave her the green light, although it meant going back to an entry-level position.
Since that time, Sheard has been unstoppable.
Finding Brilliant People, Brilliant Brands Follow
Sheard’s openness to leaping into new opportunities has served her well. Early in her career, she did stints in consulting at McKinsey & Company and worked in brand management at the BBC in their news and music departments.
Sheard’s path eventually led to King Entertainment, makers of Candy Crush, though she’d never played an online game prior to joining the company. The opportunity came when a headhunter called while she was on maternity leave with her second baby: “You need to go meet these Swedish guys. They’ve got this game, they don’t know a lot about branding.”
She was skeptical, but she took the meeting at a time when the game was in its infancy. What she found was illuminating. “ They were brilliant,” she recalls, “But what was really interesting for me is they weren’t good at what I was good at. And for me, you want to find something where they’re incredible, but you uniquely can help them.”
This time, her mother’s reaction was a bit less supportive. Sheard recalls her saying, “You’re leaving the BBC for what? For who? Candy Crush? Candy what?”
Looking back, Sheard says: “I used to think, is it a negative that I’ve moved around … And now I’ve come to realize that actually I think there’s a place for people like me… someone from the outside can just bring a little bit of a different perspective.”
Moving From Beauty To Bluey & Bingo
After Candy Crush went public and eventually sold to Activision Blizzard, Sheard moved on to serve as CMO at Charlotte Tilbury. In 2020, she went back to the BBC and, in 2024, was named CEO, Brands & Licensing for BBC Studios.
Upon her return to the BBC, she was quick to recognize the promise of “Bluey.” The BBC is co-commissioner, distributor and licensor of the multi-award-winning animated series produced by Ludo Studio. Within her first couple of months, she “took an investment paper to our board and said, I think we need to put money behind it. I think we need to put more people behind it.”
What makes Bluey special? “It was created not actually as a kid’s show, but as a show about family life,” Sheard explains. Written by Joe Brumm based on “his own experience of being a parent,” the show captures “the authentic moments of family life, for good and for bad.”
“You simultaneously want to sort of hug and yell at your kids at the same time. And I think what Bluey does is it leans right into that family emotion,” she says.
From Show To Shelf: The Brand Of Bluey
Sheard and her team carefully manage Bluey’s expansion outside of the show. “One of our guiding principles that we talk about a lot as a team is show to shelf,” Sheard explains. “We want to bring as much of what people love about the show to the shelf or the stage or whatever else we are doing.”
Sheard and her team “spend ages working with our toy partners, making sure that the lids of the trash cans are exactly the same color as the lids in the show.” When they created the stage show, “it was actually written as an episode of the TV show.”
The result? Bluey partnerships that cut across digital games, toys, live shows, apparel, social media and more. “I literally get stopped everywhere I go” when wearing Bluey Converse shoes. “People go, where do I get those? They’re so beautiful.”
And two of the biggest markers of Bluey’s success: the character will launch in Disney Parks early next year (a rarity for a non-Disney creation), and a feature-length movie is coming in 2027.
Sheard and her team understand that the audience feels a special connection with Bluey, and they are committed to honoring that. Sheard says it’s “a brand where people strongly associate themselves with it. You see families going out, dressed up for Halloween, like they really feel, ‘I’m the Bandit’ who’s the dad, or ‘I’m the Chili,’ or ‘this is my Bingo.’ It’s a real privilege when fans do that.”
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