what if I told you that your brand could be loved by millions of people just with one product launch well it can thanks to licensing licensing has been one of the key reasons for the ud's success doing over $100 million in famous licenses such as Disney Warner Brothers Nickelodeon even Pokémon in this video I'm going to go through exactly what to do and what not to do so that you can launch licensing for your brand it doesn't matter if you're a tiny brand and you're just getting started these tactics can work but it's really really
important that you understand all of the risks with licensing as well so that you don't actually lose money rather than make it at the end of 2020 I was really trying to figure out where I could take the udie at that point I'd created all the prints myself using meme culture every time I would see Memes pop up such as avocado and toast there was a famous politician that said Australians should stop eating avoc cardo and toast that they they could save on a home loan I would launch that oodie and it would connect with
those people same with the sloth reading the book people could just understand who that oody was meant for but I was running out of ideas and I didn't know where to take it then we decided to start working with Warner Brothers one of the biggest licensers in the world growing up I was a huge friends fan I used to just watch Friends nonstop and I thought it had the perfect Affinity with the udie cuz people just love watching TV in their udie one of Brothers also had Harry Potter which I was also a big fan
of so naive to what was going to come next we decided to just grab these assets put them on the AUD into our first license launch still living with my parents at time I remember launching it and we did over $500,000 in just a few weeks completely selling out if I actually knew how to do inventory management back then it could have been a lot lot bigger you see licensing is the process of borrowing another company's IP and aligning it with yours let's say for example you have a t-shirt brand you could contact anyone from
Coca-Cola to Disney even a celebrity and ask if you can use their assets or their likeness to support your marketing or your product development you can either sell it on your website or sell it in other places and then you just need to pay them what's called a royalty there are also so many different types of Licensing that you can do for example you might have seen the word gortex on a lot of Outdoor Equipment this is actually a company that creates a material that is really really trusted even Nike is putting gortex on their
sneakers because people love the material so much and it helps align a reputable brand like Nike known for its quality to another reputable brand known for its quality there's also other forms of Licensing like music licensing for those that are old enough to remember you might remember the Cadre ad where there's the gorilla playing the drums to in the air tonight and finally those that are Alex hosi fans he talks about licensing his actual marketing framework to Jims all the time taking his business to a small business allowing it to scale up to lots and
lots of gyms for the Udi we did this really creative Nutella campaign where we would get people to buy jars and they can win one of 500 Nutella udies people would be going through the shopping aises and seeing the oodies printed on these Nutella labels aligning our brand with their really lovable delicious brand people would then go to the website sign up and would be able to capture email marketing leads as well there is really no limit on licensing and it depends on how creative you want to get but it's really important that we understand
why branding Works sure there's the emotional connection part these brands have built so much emotional connection over the years that you can now leverage on your product after all branding is earned in drips and lost in buckets and these people have just been collecting drips for so long but there's actually a technical element something that a lot of people are underestimating in the e-commerce Community the best analogy for licensing is fishing let's say every ad you create let's say it's a Facebook ad you're casting that ad out there and you're attracting one type of customer
licensing is pretty much changing that bait so you can attract two types of fish you've got your initial customer audience that might like your product anyway but then you've got this whole another audience that is really attracted to your product as well so you're basically merging the customer audiences this is why licensing is so important on digital ads because Facebook is able to find these new pockets of audiences that it can Target your product to bringing them over into your corner but the problem is not many people know how to do licensing I certainly had
no idea how to get it started but before I teach you that let me firstly do a Shameless plug about our new mentorship program no this isn't a course no this isn't applicable for people doing under a million dollar Revenue I've got a free Discord for that you can get all of your information free I'll leave a link for the description for the Discord but my new mentorship is is called daily Mentor where we're going to be going over this stuff product development Inventory management cash flow forecast all of those kind of things what were
the best licensing Partners to reach out to for your brand we're currently weight listed at the moment especially for our Australia based groups definitely send me an email click on the link below and we'll get you on the weight list all righty back to it so the first step is identifying your ideal licensing partner there are so many different ways to achieve this the one that I think you should do is go to a brand that you look up to that shares a similar audience to you and look at the licensing Partners they've collaborated with
that doesn't mean you need to do the exact same licensing partner remember the analogy of fishing you really want to get these new audiences get something new in front of them and align your Brands but you may want to do something similar for example if they've done a Bluey license one of the biggest licenses in the world right now you might want to do a similar kids show as well the other thing I recommend if you're going to try to work with one of the major Studios there are going to be some limitations on that
around your size which I'll get into in just a minute but a great way to pick your licenses if you are working with them is just looking at the upcoming movie launches for example our Barbie collaboration was one of our best because they did such a great marketing effort and the movie was so good and we just dropped it at the perfect time another great way to find awesome licensing is heading over to Vegas no not to party but going to one of the licensing Expos over there there'll be a lot of booths that you
can go up learn more about Niche licenses or big licenses and you can actually get contacts there one of the main things that will determine whether you actually get a response from a lot of these licensing is size so Disney Warner Brothers they have so much legal paperwork that they need to go through that they're not going to profit if you're a really small brand this is why you need to Niche down worst of all you're probably not going to profit because of what we call a minimum guarantee this is really standard in the industry
what that means is to protect the collaboration these major licenses will set a minimum amount that you need to sell let's say for example your royalty is 10% of your sales you may go to this Lor and say I'm going to sell $500,000 worth of product they might want to go okay I'm going to set the minimum guarantee at 40,000 cuz you're saying you're going to sell $500,000 which would be a $50,000 royalty because you're paying them 10% but we really need a hedge our bets and we're going to put a minimum guarantee at 40,000
if you failed to launch the product or failed to sell as many as you forecasted then you are going to be up for that extra 50,000 imagine if you didn't launch any product because it didn't work out you would still be up to that money this is why working with really Niche licenses and contacting them in the initial stages is really beneficial because they're probably going to have really low MGS or maybe no MGS at all and they just really want to work with you this is why I encourage you to think outside the box
with your licensing collaborations case Def One of the director consumer e-commerce Darlings did a an amazing collaboration with DHL I'm pretty sure Supreme even worked with DHL if you're going to line your brand properly you'll be rewarded for this creativity so now you've identified your license you really need to contact them so if you're at the Vegas trade show you're going to get a card which is great but if you're just reaching out on LinkedIn you really got to sell yourself these people would get so many messages sometimes these brands do have portals where you
can actually submit it if not just contact the founder on Instagram just send them a mockup product that you've created of the overlap of your Brands and make sure you say what you think you can sell get them really excited about the collaboration another big part of this process is actually creating the forecast as I mentioned earlier when I was starting the udie I had no idea how to create this but it is really important if you're working with some of the bigger licenses they're going to want spreadsheets of like exact sales that you're going
to be able to do and it can put a lot of stress on a lot of your teams such as your product team your operation team and your Finance team so make sure you're ready and then the final step is the funnest part which is where you're collaborating for the more established licenses you'll get access to what they call a portal which is just all of their assets you can scroll for days through these things and you can talk about them about adding them to your product then you need to put a great marketing strategy
together the marketing is key and a lot of these licensers will actually need to approve every single email every single product every single product image that you're putting their brand on which makes sense they're trying to protect it the execution of all of this process is really important you need to be professional the better you execute the more that they will want to work with you about a year and a half we saw the Australian football league was selling a very similar product to us we went to them and said let us do it let
us see if we can do it better we custom designed every single team mascot and put it on the Udi we even set up these fun interactive booths outside of the stadium where people could come and win oodies and sales were incredible and now we're just extending with them because it's going so well licensing is a whole lot of fun and I hope more e-commerce Brands adapt it earlier don't forget to like And subscribe peace
