LIMA

NEW YORK, NY; April 19, 2017—Celebrity designer Nikki Chu posted a piece of wall art on Instagram recently and received 45 requests asking where to purchase it within 10 minutes.

Wall art from Nikki Chu Home

“People are hungry for the instant gratification of buying the products they see online,” Chu said as part of an International Licensing Industry Merchandisers Association (LIMA) webinar today, “The Ins and Outs of Licensing For The Home.” Also speaking were Ilana Wilensky of Jewel Branding & Licensing, an agency, and Greg Wyman, founder and president of The Wyman Group; Wyman initiated the B. Smith with Style brand and today manages (along with Jewel) the Poetic Wanderlust brand designed by Tracy Porter.

Tips from the session:

• The importance of photography to online sales can’t be underestimated, noted Wyman. “Subtlety doesn’t work online,” added Chu.
• Product photos should feature related items, both to put the spotlighted item in context and to introduce the buyer to accessories that will work with it. “The background [goods] aren’t just props,” said Wyman.
• Funnel all products through a brand page, advised Wilensky, as Wayfair and Bed Bath & Beyond do for the Nikki Chu Home brand. That way the consumer doesn’t have to hunt through pages to find each item.

• Fashion brands do not automatically translate to home, according to Wilensky. Similarly, said Wyman, “a celebrity in some other area does not mean you’ll be absorbed into the home world.” Whatever the origin of the IP, all agreed, the brand “has to have significant reason to be in the home.”
  

  Source: Jewel Branding & Licensing

• Unlike fashion, the home market introduces new goods twice a year, noted Chu. This compares to the average 4-5 seasons annually for apparel—not to mention the even greater frequency for fast fashion.
• “If I design a rug,” said Chu, “it takes 4-5 months before I see the first prototype. By the time a product comes in that may be your only shot to get it into the store. [That requires a high degree of] accuracy from the designer for the first go-round because you may not have a second opportunity.”
• Bedding & furniture are the anchors for entering the home market, per Wilensky. “Start with one of those and expand from there. That drives the aesthetic from which you can build the whole collection.”
• “The more licenses you obtain the more difficult it is to maintain a through-line aesthetic across categories,” said Chu. “You want to maintain the integrity of the line but you also have to be able to work with your manufacturers’ design teams so they can get out of the program what they need as well.” Different manufacturers, she added, have different needs that won’t always mesh with the intended look/feel.
• Manufacturers once drove the “aesthetic,” but “today the market demands that the licensor control the look. The licensor needs to initiate ideas,” said Wyman. Today, the involvement of licensor with licensee “is not just for approvals,” adding that the retailer is no longer a third party. “The licensor has to drive the brand with the retailer,” concurred Wilensky.
• Neither manufacturers nor retailers will take designers on unless they have a strong identity – patterns, color combinations, look. “Then you become valuable to manufacturers,” said Chu. “Otherwise they can do it themselves.”

Need competitive research about a market segment you want to enter? Contact Ira Mayer here.

NEW YORK, NY; May 16, 2016—The joy of Surtex, which focuses on art, about half of which is available for licensing, the other half for sale, is its co-location with ICFF, a show for contemporary and avant garde furniture and design, and the National Stationery Show. The three shows crossover with the licensing world on both the design and manufacturing levels, and feature interesting packaging ideas as well. It takes a great deal of walking, but there is a wealth of creativity to be seen and inspiration to be had.

There is also fluidity across the shows in that some exhibitors would be wholly comfortable in different areas — particularly some of the artists found in ICFF and the Stationery Show who might be best served by the Surtex audience of manufacturers and retailers. That’s what makes a 5+ hour walk here fascinating (and I didn’t make it to the downstairs furniture show which in the past has been heavy on upscale living and bedroom offerings, lighting, and the like).

Most interesting finds this year were the first two exhibitors at the far end of the hall on the third level in an area dedicated to emerging designers.

Mike Joyce is an established graphic designer whose Stereotype graphic design agency features a portfolio strong on album art (Katy Perry, Iggy Pop, others) and advertising (Volvo, Visa, etc.).

Mike Joyce and his Swissted posters

His “personal project,” Swissted, started in 2012, combines his “love of Swiss graphic design and punk rock by redesigning old” concert posters into International Typographic Style posters. He takes information such as the band lineup, date, venue, and ticket prices from the originals (which he collects) and creates entirely new designs. He sells museum quality prints on 140 lb. cover stock in multiple sizes from $50 (17”x23.75”) to $150 (36”x50.5”) but is looking to “carry it to the next level” and is open to licensing the work.

Next to Joyce is Airplantman Josh Rosen, who creates vertical garden frames and tabletop “vases” — I hesitate to use the word (he calls them vessels) to house airplants.

Airplantman frame…

…and vessels

The plants are dipped in water for a few hours about once a week. Easy to see the frames or vessels licensed by botanical gardens or other nature-oriented or environmental properties, and certainly sold in those venues. The frames, available 11”x11”, 11”x18”, and 24”x18”, are powder coated aluminum with nylon coated stainless steel cable that holds the plants in place. They retail for up to $135.

Other creative executions:

• Cardboard six-pack beer carrier with attached greeting card from Beer Greetings. It’s the beer equivalent of the ever-popular wine bag with card on the carrying handle. In this case the card is the side of the package. Retails for $4.95, which is the same as a mid-range greeting card these days. The company has been selling the item direct for about a year and a half and started wholesaling the line about six months ago.
• Monster Factory has been making licensed Volkswagen children’s play tents for some years (I remember seeing them at Bed Bath & Beyond); now they’ve added a VW van pet carrier, a cooler, picnic blankets, and a pet bowl.
  

  Beer Greetings’ gift packages

  

  Monster Factory’s vintage VW pet carrier

General trends:

• New coloring books are still pouring forth, despite the fact that the market is reportedly cooling.
  

  Coloring books and soup cans

  

  DIY Warhol Time Capsules

  

  Omy coloring postcards

  Galison, exhibiting in the Chronicle Books booth, has a recently-released Andy Warhol coloring book with the Warhol Velvet Underground album cover banana on the cover (Galison has a range of Warhol items, including soup cans and a coming Time Capsule kit). Paris-based Omy, distributed in the U.S. by Ameico, has pocket maps, postcard books, fanny packs, pencil cases and other items. Hester & Cook has placemats and placecards. Sourcebooks offers calendars, dream books, and such. The list goes on.

• Flash drive manufacturer Mimoco, which specializes in licensed drives, says sales of classic Star Wars models have cooled off, though younger fans are still interested in the newer characters.
  

  Mimoco Star Wars flash drives

  If Star Wars, its best seller, indexes at 100, the second best-selling line, Marvel, would index at about 75, a sales rep says. The company has confidence that Star Wars has longevity while it expects the Marvel line to drop off over a five to six year period.

About three and a half hours into walking these shows, I was starting to think there were substantially fewer letterpress companies exhibiting than the last few years, and that Brooklyn had lost its cache. Not at all. Minutes later I made it to a dedicated letterpress area in the stationery show—and within about 10 minutes and two or three aisles had come across I Am Here Brooklyn (jewelry), Boundless Brooklyn (DIY paper sculpture kits of water towers, bridges, etc.), Gold Teeth Brooklyn (greeting cards), Umlaut Brooklyn (cards and wine bags), and the representative from French chocolatier Marie Belle, which has a New York store in Soho, immediately informed me (with no prompting) that they now have a store in Brooklyn, too. Not to mention that many of those letterpress firms are located in Brooklyn even if the company names doesn’t shout it out.

On the packaging front, two exhibitors made great use of cork-stoppered glass vials: Japan’s YHM Jewelry, which also has a Brooklyn store but which mostly sells online, uses glass vials about 6” high that have a little greenery at the bottom and eyehooks in the cork from which are suspended necklaces or earrings. It’s a beautiful presentation (and the much of the jewelry is quite nice and very original). Similarly, the aforementioned I Am Here Brooklyn uses much smaller vials for its hammered metal pendants with an initial on them. Again, makes for a nice display concept.

YMH Jewelry

I Am Here Brooklyn

Unto itself Surtex, which is relatively small, isn’t formally a curated show, but it’s always seemed to attract a high quality of exhibitors. Plenty of seasonal art, children’s, florals; many agents, some of which have a certain consistency of taste across the artists they represent, some of which are totally varied in an effort to have something for every retail need; many new artists each year looking to test the waters. Surtex is as good a barometer of what’s available for licensing for textiles and other goods as you’re going to find. The bonus is that the co-located shows might not be as focused on textile-oriented designs, but are full of licensable ideas — from designs to products to packaging.

The shows opened at the Javits Center here yesterday, and run until 6 p.m. today and until 4 p.m. Tuesday.

Next up: I’ll be at Licensing Expo in Las Vegas June 20 (day before the show opens), 21 and 22. I am available to conduct personal tours of the show based on your needs. Two slots remain. For information about the personal tour, please contact me at ira@iramayer.com. I’m also leading a workshop, How to Work With Licensing Agents and Consultants, as part of LIMA’s Licensing University on the 21st. My panelists are an all-star team of Gary Caplan, Gary Caplan Inc.; Carole Postal, CopCorp; and Ilana Wilensky, Jewel Branding. To register for Licensing University, click here.