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, Gayle Kabaker and Marianne Richmond. Can you tell me a little about their work and what sets it apart and where you think their licensing opportunities will be?

We’ve actually signed three new artists; David Wohlrab has also joined Two Town Studios. They have three very different styles – Gayle comes from a background in fashion and commercial illustration and has a very beautiful, soft contemporary look. David Wohlrab is more of a classic illustrator, highly skilled and has worked for years in 2D and 3D product design. Marianne Richmond began with a card line and built that into a successful career as a million-selling author, speaker and connection expert. All three have the knowledge and experience to create opportunities in a wide variety of categories, so right now we are not restricting our efforts for them to anything specific.

Can you tell me about the My Friend Ronnie™ property and some new licensing agreements with that property?

Ronnie Walter, the author and artist, developed the My Friend Ronnie ™ collection to help fill the need for a women’s humor property that is clever, funny and irreverent but not snide or mean spirited. Our first My Friend Ronnie license was a gift bag at Target about 5 years ago, and since then we have been adding partners whenever appropriate. In January we debuted a full line of giftware with Westland Giftware, a 100 sku signature card and gift stationery collection from Leanin’ Tree, and a line of decorative plaques with Enesco/Dept 56. We very recently signed an international partner who will be producing My Friend Ronnie products in the Netherlands.

Are there any particular artists or collections you’ll be highlighting at the SURTEX and Licensing Expo this year? What makes them stand out in the market?

We will not be exhibiting at Surtex this year for the first time in more than a decade but have expanded our presence at the Licensing Expo. We have a number of new and established properties that we will show there:

Real Women…Real Country ™ is a new humorous collection from Ronnie Walter aimed at the millions of women raising “crops, critters and kids” – whether in or out of the city – who have little time for spas, sports cars or tiny dogs that fit in their purse. It is clever and hip but with country pride – just like the 50 million women who live outside the major metros in the US. It has already been picked up for a 32 sku greeting card line.

Krista Hamrick’s “Name Above all Names” collection is unique in the marketplace – it is an illustrated alphabet of names for God, each with Scripture reference – and a beautiful work of art. It has been licensed for fabric, woven goods, canvas wall art and some personalized product, and has excellent potential for expansion into many more categories.

Artist and toy designer Betsy Veness has several new collections for toddler to tweens including Wee Tooters, Polk and Dottie and Don’t Cross Me which is a sassy tween girl property that will make you laugh out loud.

Have you signed any new licensing contracts recently or broken into any new product categories for the first time? Are there any particular categories you are interested in pursuing to a greater extent this year?

We maintain hundreds of active agreements and sign new ones almost every week, however we did get a couple of new categories recently. We are now on disposable trash bins and “edible greeting cards”, which are actually very tasty decorated cookies that are sent to people like cards. We would like to do much more work in the apparel categories and have recently partnered with a firm that has good connections in that business to market our properties to those manufacturers. Expanding our tabletop and home goods licenses is a goal – we have some penetration into those categories but would like to see more. We are also nibbling around the edges of the publishing and entertainment business to see if there is any way to transition some of our properties in those directions.

What are some retail chains your licensed products are being sold in? Any new retail outlets this year?

We have licensed product of some sort in every level of retail, and due to the number of licensees there is no sure way to track where all of it may be until we see the reports, and even then we won’t know who all of the end users are. In chains, I know as of today there is product in Target, Wal-Mart, Michaels, Lowes, Joanns, AC Moore, Archivers and Ace, we have a line widely distributed into drug and grocery so we are in many of those, and there are certainly more. We do have giftware going into Macy’s this fall and I believe that will be new location for us.

What product categories do you expect will be strong in 2010/2011? How do you think the business is shaping up?

Two big but very different questions. For us, I expect the social expression industry will stay strong along with message-based products, particularly those with connection messages. Techno-products, like ringtones and skins. And there are certainly a lot of babies out there, which may bode well for those categories that have tie-in to babies and moms. I always hesitate to predict what will be working next year – at least in writing – because it really is anyone’s guess.

Business is good, and I see that continuing. I do think, however, that we have to acknowledge the impact that technology is having on the art licensing business – it is changing virtually every aspect of our operation from how we represent the artists to how we show the designs, and to some degree it even affects what designs now work in the marketplace. Throw in the pressures of a troubled economy and the evolution of the retailer purchasing models and it becomes a very different business than it was just a couple of years ago.
Technology has also enabled the recent influx of hundreds of new artists who have heard about and want to “try” art licensing, but unfortunately this increase in artists is not matched by an increase in licensing opportunities, in fact it is quite the opposite. The result is that they are picking off the “low hanging fruit” – a card here, a gift bag there, maybe a run of fabric – and the cumulative effect is being felt by everyone in the business as the opportunities to license art become diluted by their sheer numbers.
Rather than sit back and watch, we are looking at how to adjust our strategy to take advantage of these changes, whether that’s guiding our artists toward more targeted collections, partnering with local experts in new categories and geographical areas, or by utilizing the amazing marketing reach that we can now access with the push of a keyboard button.
And then of course we need to be ready for all that to change again tomorrow…

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 change from the last couple of years. Day 1 started with a bang right at opening and stayed busy all day, a bit unusual for this show where typically the first mornings have been a bit slower in the Art & Design section while everyone visits the newest “fireworks and Ferris wheels” on the main floor. Day 2 cooked right along as well, and true to form Day 3 dropped off quickly and by afternoon things were winding down. We had booked appointments at various times all three days and so we did not see very much down time, but the consensus I heard was that it was worthwhile for the other exhibitors as well, and also that the attendees were focused and knew what they wanted.

Some quick observations from the show:

1. The Licensing Expo seems to be less and less effective for single design art sourcing every year as the movement continues toward broader collections with a point of view and hopefully a compelling story.

2. There is not a lot of the above.
(For what it’s worth, we did hear a couple of times that the quality of the art displayed in the section was noticeably better this year – and it has always been pretty good at this show.)

3. Retailers, and therefore also manufacturers, are still being cautious about anything new or unknown so we continue to see the old established properties in play or being resurrected and brought to market. Our joke is that they want “new but proven”…good luck with that…

4. International licensing is continuing to expand for art-based properties. We had meaningful meetings with both partner agencies and manufacturers from the UK, Brazil, Denmark, Israel and Mexico.

5. Apparently the I-Pad is emerging as the greatest invention of all time, and you will be seeing fewer and fewer paper and binder type portfolios from this point onward.

All for now, seat backs and tray tables up for landing….

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 and did not try to defend or dispute it, but rather he explained why her viewpoint had some validity.)

So I just finished a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding along with the bonus 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding. Both were written a number of years ago, and I had to flash back to Ketra’s words of wisdom throughout the process of reading them. The authors offer a number of conclusions that may have made sense when they were writing the book, but now…well, you judge, here’s a few:
1. Advertising won’t work on the Internet
2. Yahoo won the information and search war.
3. Search engines will decline as people learn what they want to visit on the net.
4. AOL is the top dog among internet service providers.
5. E-Trade probably won’t make it as a new business.
6. Introducing Diet Coke was a mistake for Coke because it dilutes their brand.
7. Hyundai lacks product focus and isn’t likely to make it in the new world order.

Huh. My intent here is not to trash the book – Al and Laura Ries are smart people and there is a lot of good information in it – but rather to illustrate how rapidly our industry (and our world) is changing. The lifespan of usable information is no longer measured in decades, sometimes not even years, but in months, days and hours. A lot of what used to work in this business no longer does, and those artists who realize the old method of throwing crap against the wall until something sticks is GONE will be the ones whose name you see on the products. For the next few minutes anyway.

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 business event where designers could sell their wares to manufacturers, and early on most did sell outright, but through the years licensing has taken over. The show once featured almost 350 exhibitors and occupied several of the halls at Javits in its heyday. But things do change, and it has been shrinking for a lot of reasons – such as online technology, the growth of newer show venues, fluctuating attendee numbers, the decline of the concurrent National Stationery Show, the relentless price increases, the drop-out of experienced artists – just to name a few. It’s not the show it used to be, and our own measurable results from the last couple years there were not what they used to be either, so for the first time in more than a decade we will not be exhibiting at Surtex. (You will still find us exhibiting elsewhere – Atlanta, CHA, Licensing Expo, maybe others).
Not being there however does not change how I feel about agents and artists who don’t exhibit attending the show: they should not be there.

OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh as there are a few valid reasons for an artist to attend – to evaluate exhibiting, attend a seminar, look for an agent, you’re an art student or you are represented on the floor. But that’s about it. For years exhibitors have been complaining to show mgmt about all the portfolios being shown in the lobby, the food courts, sometimes inside Surtex itself – and nothing was being done about it. Granted it is difficult to police, particularly with the NSS going on, but many if not most of the artists/agents doing the showing were there for one reason – a free ride on the backs of those paying dearly to exhibit in the show. I still bristle every time I read a comment from a non-exhibiting artist who says they are going to Surtex to meet licensees, and shake my head in wonder as exhibitors give them advice on how to do it. (More on that later…). It is gratifying to hear from some of the manufacturers that they will refuse to meet with non-exhibiting artists within the Javits center, but unfortunately they are few and far between.

So yes, Surtex is coming, but as I have said before: this is a business to business event and not a public art fair – if you are not paying for the opportunity to do business there, please don’t take advantage of those that are.

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 to buy the product templates (there are several current suppliers) and start slapping on their designs using a decal-type approach without giving much thought to whether it makes sense. (Think bananas on a coffee cup, poodles on a dinner plate…)

The view seems to be that going into art licensing as a business is a natural extension or progression of an artist’s career path. I would suggest that is backwards – art licensing is more an extension of product design and marketing.

Product design is one of the most difficult, but also most important, skills to learn. It is always a moving target combining elements of trend, manufacturing costs and time to market, realities such as packaging and breakage, current competition, customer demographics and more. Of course you won’t know all of that starting out, it will come as you work with the manufacturers, however you can learn much by studying what is on the market now. Never pass by a potentially licensed product in a store without picking it up to see who made it and if someone is credited on the copyright. Learn the difference between acrylic, resin and ceramic, decal and hand painted, flat and embossed. What is a die cut? What are embellishments? Really what you are doing here is learning a second language – that of manufacturing and product marketing. What colors don’t reproduce well? What mediums can produce detailed sculpts? Which are more cost effective? Art directors may pass on your designs for any of these reasons, so the more you know the more likely you are to design saleable product.

I will say it again: to really succeed in this business you need to change your thinking and your focus, because art licensing is not about the art, it is about selling product. Collections that are page after (tiring) page of the same templates just don’t work, instead they should be unique and clever adaptations of the artwork into potential products. If you look up “product design” you will find terms such as innovation, idea generation, concept development, usability – those you can take to the bank.