I did a question and answer interview with License! Global magazine recently but (as usual…) most of it ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe I talk too much? What they published in the Licensing Expo Show Daily you can read here but the entire interview is below. You’ve recently signed two new artists, […]
There has been a long standing discussion about whether “licensing” is an industry or is it simply a business model for an intellectual property, or IP, owner to make their product or process available to the marketplace and hopefully generate revenue. This is the “license-out” model that we are all familiar with, where someone other […]
We’re cruising along over the Rockies at 39,000 feet and another Licensing Show (our ninth) is behind us. And so is the 110 degree weather – dry heat or not that is just plain hot. It was, once again, a good show for us. There was a definite positive energy at this show, a welcome […]
I just read a great story on GreetingsMagazine.com about a company named Lucky Break that has won a design infringement suit against Sears and their ad agency. (It is a huge URL so you will need to search for it on the site). The story does not give all the legal details but it is […]
One of my favorite posts of late is a comment by my friend Ketra of AOP Studios, made a few weeks back in a discussion about a how-to book for Art Licensing: “frankly, anything written more than about 8 months ago is completely out of date”. (And kudos to the author, Michael Woodward, who commented […]
We did a little traveling this past week and presented art to a couple of our clients at their offices. These meetings are usually fun, not only as opportunities to show portfolios but also as a chance to meet the rest of their staff, discuss in depth what may work for them, where they see […]
Surtex is coming, Surtex is coming! There has been a lot of chatter recently about the coming Surtex show, I guess for good reason because for many years it was the place to be seen for art licensors. The show (an acronym for Surface and Textile design) started 20-some years ago as a business to […]
Being a native Minnesotan I had to watch the pilot episode of “Happy Town” last night, a new TV series set in a Minnesota town. It was, in a word, awful. But it did have us howling in laughter as gaff after gaff made it clear that whomever was producing this mess has likely never […]
As the surge toward what I call “Popular Art Licensing” continues (magazine out soon) we have been seeing more and more submissions and web displays consisting of “cookie cutter” product pages attached to design after design. In some cases they are appropriate, in others most definitely not. A common trap for a new artist is […]
We get a fair number of inquiries from artists who are looking to license one or more characters that they have created. It generally starts like this: I have designed a set of characters and am looking for an agent. OK, possibly the start of something. My favorite experience licensing character collections: we were barely […]