Licensing at Retail
By Staff -- Gifts & Decorative Accessories, 7/1/2007
Home Accents Today, Gifts & Decorative Accessories' sister publication, recently conducted a survey of retailers to determine what licensed product contributed to their sales. More than half — 60 percent — said licensed goods make up 20 percent or less of both sales and merchandise mix. (Of respondents, 35 percent were home accents/gift stores, furniture stores represented 17 percent, and 10 percent were interior designers.)
Lamps and lighting were the most popular licensed category, at 46 percent; decorative accessories came in second at 42 percent. While most respondents plan to change nothing about their handling of licensed product, 13 percent plan to decrease what they carry and only 10 percent plan to increase it.
On the manufacturer's side, home decor licensing grew 11 percent this year, according to the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association (LIMA). Gift/novelty licensing increased 8 percent. Other growing categories included apparel (17 percent) and toys/games (15 percent).
Of the types of licensed properties, art licensing — perhaps the most common in the gift industry — led the pack in growth rate, showing a 4 percent royalty increase of $7 million. That's still a drop in the bucket, however, compared to categories like Entertainment/Characters, whose 2 percent increase added $54 million to its $2.68 billion total, accounting for 44 percent of the market.
Overall, manufacturers paid $6.04 billion in licensing royalties in the U.S. in 2006, up 1.5 percent over 2005.
