How Coyote Peterson Created an Extensive Merch Collection Centered on His Content

Building a merch collection doesn’t need to be hard.

For most Creators, building an online store filled with items inspired by your content is a no-brainer. Because when it comes down to it, all you need to know is what items make the most sense for you and your audience. 

Creators like Coyote Peterson have thrived in this department. 

For nearly a decade, the wildlife educator and YouTuber has built a massive audience through his crazy nature videos, in which he lets himself be stung or bitten by some of the world's most dangerous animals.

His popularity, charisma, and in-depth knowledge of wildlife have not only allowed him to expand his brand into television, books, and paid wildlife experiences, but also enabled him to create an extensive merch collection for both children and adults. 

This Creator Spotlight takes a deep look at how Coyote Peterson turned his passion for wildlife and turned it into a business that reaches millions.

We’ll also explore how he built a merch line that feels like a natural extension of his content, and what his approach can teach other Creators trying to turn an audience into something more durable than ad revenue.

Stepping into the Wild: Building a Channel Off Critter Love

Coyote Peterson grew up in Newbury, Ohio, in a town with no fast-food restaurants and, notably, no Starbucks. 

His love of animals started early, with him and his sister spending their childhood running loose in the creek behind their house, catching bullfrogs, painted turtles, and water snakes. 

The most dangerous thing in the neighborhood was a common snapping turtle, which, fittingly, became his lifelong favorite animal. 

He never had any formal training, with most of his knowledge coming from books, hands-on experience, and what he describes as a near-photographic memory paired with fast hand-eye coordination.

By the time he reached The Ohio State University, animals had taken a back seat to "typical teenage-type things." What stuck, instead, was storytelling. 

Peterson became fascinated with why films made people feel the way they did, and he wanted to learn how to produce that feeling himself. 

Ohio State didn't have a film program, so he built his own. He pieced together a personalized cinema major by taking classes from multiple departments to learn writing, producing, business, and law. He had no interest in ever being in front of a camera. 

He hosted a screenwriting competition and then directed the university's first feature film in over 25 years.

The idea for Brave Wilderness came together with his business partner, Mark Vins, while both were working day jobs. They spent more than five years developing the concept, originally casting a different on-camera host while Peterson directed and wrangled the animals from behind the scenes.

It wasn't until production executives repeatedly asked where the animals came from that Peterson showed them behind-the-scenes footage of himself catching them. That's when everyone realized the real star of the show wasn't the animals—it was Peterson himself.

They launched the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel in 2014, seeing it as a way to bypass Hollywood gatekeepers entirely. 

As Peterson put it, going the YouTube route meant no executives, no parent company, and basically full control of their own intellectual property. 

That control came from a deliberate early decision to protect their IP legally, using an entertainment attorney to make sure they weren't signing away the rights to their own footage or likeness while pitching the concept around town. 

It took nearly a decade of unpaid effort (the channel didn't generate consistent revenue until 2016) before the "glorified hobby," as Peterson has called it, became a career.

From there, the brand expanded steadily.

In 2020, he landed his own Animal Planet series, Coyote Peterson: Brave the Wild, and has continued to create wildlife adventures through 2026, including a recent collaboration with wildlife filmmaker Casey Anderson to explore a remote animal boneyard in Yellowstone National Park. 

Even after moving away from the “sting and bite” videos that made him famous, Peterson has stayed active by finding new ways to educate and entertain his audience.

Expanding a Wildlife Brand into Merchandise

Over the years, Peterson has established himself as a prominent voice in wildlife education on social media and in television.

Today, Brave Wilderness remains one of the top wildlife channels on YouTube. 

With more than 21 million subscribers, the show has expanded into several additional YouTube channels, including individual channels for Peterson and Vins, a Top Videos channel with 239K subscribers that features the brand’s most extreme moments, and 12 foreign-language channels dubbed for viewers in Bulgaria, France, Italy, Ukraine, India, and other countries.

That popularity has allowed Peterson not only to expand his brand into other media but also into merchandising, where he has successfully capitalized on his wild antics by building a product line that extends the Brave Wilderness experience beyond the screen.

Shop Brave Wilderness

When it comes to merch collections, ShopBraveWilderness doesn’t limit itself to creativity or product selection. 

With nearly 100 items spanning across nine collections, this merch store (hosted on Fourthwall) offers a variety of apparel, accessories, drinkware, and even stimulant beverages. 

The Brave Kids Collection targets the show's younger demographic with friendly designs and integrates with Peterson’s Sting Zone Collection, which features colorful illustrations of some of the most dangerous creatures encountered.  

The Coyote Peterson Collection and the Mark Vins Collection split the brand between the show’s two personalities, with Peterson’s collection offering more on-brand apparel, such as “Howl at the Moon” crewnecks and “Coyote’s Sketchbook” tees, while Vins’ leans more into the Brave Wilderness brand.

When it comes to sustainability, Brave Wilderness offers about 20 eco-friendly shirts and hoodies throughout their collections, each made from 100% organic cotton. For an audience that already cares about animals and the environment, sustainably made apparel isn't an extra detail to entice shoppers—it signals the brand’s credibility. 

Rounding out the store is the Field Notes and Artifacts Collection, which offers custom notebooks, stickers, magnets, mugs, and posters featuring Peterson’s “Sting Index” with the Executioner Wasp front and center on most of the designs, as well as the “Be Brave, Stay Wild” slogan incorporated on every poster. 

But what really sticks out in this store is Brave Wilderness’s own brand of Conservation Coffee that comes in three different blends. What’s unique about this product is its mission. 

A portion of every purchase supports global conservation projects through their partnership with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, which also ensures the coffee is certified organic and shade-grown using environmentally responsible farming practices. 

It's a small but telling detail. One that turns a simple coffee purchase into proof that Brave Wilderness's environmental message isn't just something Peterson talks about on camera, but something built into how the business actually runs.

Book Collection

Peterson's book series is a case study in itself, showcasing a Creator who recognized his brand's true value and expanded it into a format that YouTube alone couldn't offer. 

Titles like Brave Adventures: Wild Animals in a Wild World and Epic Encounters in the Animal Kingdom take the same first-person, in-the-moment storytelling that made his videos popular and translate it into a reading experience, chronicling everything from his first childhood snapping turtle catch to encounters with an 800-pound grizzly. 

Rather than simply repackaging existing video content, he adapted his format to fit each medium, with books like The King of Sting and The Beast of Bites leaning into narrative recaps of his most painful on-camera moments, while Wildlife Adventure and Color the Wild shift entirely into interactive formats built for kids, complete with write-in activities, stickers, and coloring pages. 

That range shows real publishing instincts as he's not just selling one book, but an entire shelf spanning different reading levels and engagement styles, from older fans who want the deeper first-person stories to younger kids who just want to color a picture of a bullet ant. 

It's a smart move for a Creator of his stature. Most influencers stop at merch or a single tie-in book, but Peterson built a genuine bibliography that turns his platform into a recurring educational resource families return to again and again, not just a one-time impulse buy.

Stock Wildlife Videography

Beyond merch and books, Peterson's team has found a third revenue stream that most outdoor Creators overlook: licensing their own raw footage as stock video.

Through Pond5 and Shutterstock, Peterson and the Brave Wilderness team have been selling stock video under the handle WildernessProd. 

Each platform offers hundreds of high-def videos, featuring the kind of production value most Creators never think to monetize, with shots like aerial drones sweeping coastlines and rainforest canopies, a mother dolphin and calf breaching in open water, and up-close shots of insects and critters in their natural habitat. 

For someone in Peterson's line of work, it's genuinely a smart monetization avenue because the footage already exists. Every trip his crew takes to film a new episode generates hours of usable drone and wildlife footage that never makes it into a final YouTube cut. 

So, rather than letting that footage sit unused, Brave Wilderness can license it online, turning it into a recurring income stream. 

For other Creators sitting on hours of unused b-roll, location shots, or high-quality photography, Peterson's approach is a reminder that content doesn't have to be "finished" or fan-facing to have value. 

What Creators Can Learn from Peterson's Career

Peterson's path from backyard turtle-catcher to a multi-platform brand didn't happen by accident. It was built on deliberate decisions made years before any of them paid off, with each piece reinforcing the next. 

For Creators looking to build something similarly durable, his career offers a handful of concrete lessons worth borrowing.

Build the Identity Before the Store

Merch works best when people already know what your brand stands for. 

If your audience doesn't have a clear idea of who you are or what makes your content unique, your products can end up feeling like generic items with your logo on them.

That's what Coyote Peterson got right. He spent years building his reputation as the fearless wildlife expert who gets up close with some of the world's most fascinating animals. 

By the time he launched his merch, fans already knew exactly what his brand represented, making every product feel like a natural extension of the content they already loved.

Structure Merch Around Content Pillars, Not Generic Branding

Rather than treating "merch" as one category, each of Peterson's collections is built around a specific audience segment or brand pillar—kids, sustainability, headwear, accessories, and favorite stings. 

That structure means a shopper can find something that speaks directly to the part of the brand they actually care about, instead of sorting through one undifferentiated pile of logo gear.

Protect Your IP Early

Peterson's insistence on legal ownership of his footage and likeness from the very beginning is what let him negotiate a licensing deal with Discovery later on his own terms, rather than someone else's. 

Creators who skip this step risk building an audience for a brand they don't fully own once bigger opportunities come calling. 

This can leave them negotiating from a position of weakness if a platform or network realizes that the leverage lies with whoever holds the rights, not with whoever built the following.

Diversify Without Fragmenting

YouTube, television, books, merch, and even stock footage all point back to the same mission (wildlife education and adventure) instead of pulling the brand in unrelated directions. 

That coherence means every new revenue stream strengthens the same identity rather than diluting it or confusing the audience about what the brand actually stands for.

Conclusion

Coyote Peterson's merchandising success isn't the result of flashy product designs or aggressive marketing. It comes from staying true to the brand he's built from the very beginning. 

Every collection in his store, every book, and every piece of adventure gear reflects the same mission that made Brave Wilderness successful: inspiring people, especially kids, to explore and appreciate the natural world.

That's the biggest takeaway for Creators looking to launch their own merch. 

Don't just create products for the sake of selling something. Instead, make merchandise that feels like a natural extension of the content your audience already enjoys. 

Pay attention to the videos, jokes, catchphrases, characters, or moments your fans connect with most, and let those be the inspiration for your designs rather than chasing the latest trends or guessing what might sell.