The cunning way Hawk Tuah girl makes money

Hailey Welch’s life changed completely one evening in June when she went for a night out in downtown Tennessee. She bumped into content creators Tim & Dee TV, and her answer to the question “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” went viral, like, seriously viral.

Her cheeky reply? “You gotta give ‘em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thing, you get me?”

Welch’s life turns around

Since then, Hailey Welch, who still lives with her grandma, has taken to the social media game like a duck to water. She gave up her work in a spring factory and turned to being an internet personality in the blink of an eye.

She’s already hit a million followers on Instagram and with her new found fame, the cash has started rolling in.

The so-called Hawk Tuah girl got paid $30,000 for appearing at Daer Dayclub at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, according to TMZ.

How Hawk Tuah girl makes money from merch

But there’s one really neat way Welch is monetising her moment in the limelight, thanks to her agent Jonnie Foster of management company The Penthouse.

According to him, Welch made nearly $300,000 in the first month on merchandising since going viral.

But the clever way they did it was to trademark ‘hawk tuah’ as belonging to Welch, and then bring cease-and-desist actions against anyone else who had tried to trademark it.

The next step was to contact fake accounts and set licensing deals with them to sell official merchandise using the viral phrase - that means Welch gets a cut of every sale, meaning the profits keep coming, thanks to insatiable demand from the public to have ‘hawk tuah’ merch.