Art museums around the world are expanding their licensing efforts, continuing a trend that has intensified over the past several years. Licensed products and experiences can be a way to raise awareness by bringing museums’ brands and artwork into new places, generate ancillary revenue that helps keep the institution open and support its mission, and […]
Archive | Art
Greeting Card Brands Send a Message
Three U.K. greeting card brands have recently taken steps to expand their presence in the market by forging representation agreements with licensing agents to help them facilitate their move into additional product categories or regions: Brilliantly Brave, a new greeting card publisher whose mission is to promote good mental health, both through its messaging and […]
Masterpieces on the Clothes Rack
For fast-fashion retailers, offering continuous collaborations with licensed properties, from character and entertainment IP to luxury fashion labels, has long been fundamental to their business model. Working with licensed IP is a critical tool for enabling a never-ending stream of in-and-out products that keeps their young customers coming back regularly to hunt for inexpensive treasures […]
A Little Pizzazz on the Pickleball Court
Pickleball, still relatively new on the scene as a mainstream participant sport, continues to grow in popularity with players of all ages. As a result, properties of nearly every type have lent their names, logos, and other assets to pickleball apparel, accessories, footwear, and especially paddles and paddle covers over the past few years. Recently, […]
Adding Artistic Flair to the Denim Category
Denim has been experiencing one of its cyclical upswings in popularity in the fashion world of late, and the category has been exhibiting both more creativity in design and increased collaboration activity than in the past. At the same time, artists are partnering for fashion collaborations of all kinds with ever-increasing frequency. So it makes […]
Apparel in the Picture for Photographers
Photographers are less frequent participants in apparel collaborations than artists, in part because photographs offer less flexibility in design than is possible with art imagery and in part because the pool of high-profile photographers is smaller than the pool of artists, among other factors. But there are opportunities, not just for graphic t-shirts but for […]
Monkey Business
The licensing landscape surrounding NFT images is highly fragmented. That is because, in the most popular NFT projects, owners of each unique image typically retain the right to commercialize that image and its derivative works (e.g., slightly manipulated versions for use in merchandise). Many of the licensors do not know how to go about licensing […]
Artists Navigate NFTs
Right from the beginning, artists and the art community were expected to be among the beneficiaries of the rise of NFTs. And many artists, from the biggest names in fine art to digital artists who have become known specifically for their work in the NFT space, are carving out a niche in this market. Some […]
Picture-Perfect Beauty
Art museums, and the fine artists whose work appears in those institutions, have increasingly been forging licensing and collaboration deals in the beauty category—especially in fragrances—resulting in creative interpretations of key works of art, not just on packaging but in the formulation of the scents and color palettes themselves. Products range from exceedingly limited and […]
Painting a Picture
One of the products in the gift shop at this year’s sold-out Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is a licensed plush figure depicting Dick Bruna’s rabbit character Miffy as Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. This is the latest in a small but growing group of collaborations, mostly taking place in Europe or Asia, whose design inspiration […]