Will Luke Kuechly’s hilarious CPI Security commercials retire with him?
Like the rest of Luke Kuechly’s legion of friends and fans, employees at CPI Security in Charlotte “were taken a bit by surprise” at his sudden retirement announcement, company spokeswoman Heidi Cowley said.
Kuechley’s news that he’s retiring from the Carolina Panthers and the NFL is still so fresh in everyone’s minds that it’s too early to know his future with the home security provider, Cowley told The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday. Kuechly became a CPI spokesman in 2014.
The company plans to produce a Luke Kuechly thank-you CPI Security commercial and will also release a longer video with behind-the-scenes footage on Wednesday. The commercial will air on local stations in Charlotte beginning Thursday or Friday, she said.
Through a long-running series of often hilarious commercials and videos, the star linebacker helped make the home security provider a household name in the Carolinas and beyond.
“We’re sad like everybody else, but we respect Luke’s decision,” Cowley said. “You only have one life, one brain, and he has to protect that,” she said.
CPI staff grew so close to Kuechly and so respected him that they shed tears as they talked via a group text thread Tuesday night when they learned he was retiring, Cowley said.
“We’ve gotten to know him personally, and we care about him as a person, first,” Cowley said.
Kuechly last cut a 30-second CPI TV commercial in July that ran throughout the 2019 NFL season, Cowley said. CPI typically produced Kuechly commercials in the summer, when he is off, and no commercial for 2020 was yet in the works, according to Cowley.
Perhaps the most famous of his dozen or so CPI commercials featured what quickly became the highly prized but extremely rare Luke Kuechly gnome.
The Kuechly gnome commercial debuted in January 2016 when the Panthers were in the Super Bowl. The gnome “instantly became one of the NFL’s most pursued collectibles,” The Charlotte Observer reported.
One of the gnomes sold at live auction for $16,000 to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Cowley told the Observer in 2017.
In a CPI commercial that aired during the 2018 Super Bowl, Kuechly is in the midst of an intense foosball game with now-former Panthers linebacker Thomas Davis when Christian McCaffrey, acting as a delivery guy, shows up with pizza. McCaffrey meanders about in Kuechly’s home, discovering a shrine to Kuechly’s career and a closet vault full of Kuechly gnomes.
Previous commercials showed that he bakes cookies in the shape of the gnome and has a topiary in his yard resembling the gnome.
This story was originally published January 15, 2020 at 1:04 PM.