Roman Fedotov: licensed clothes bring best profit

Licensed Marketplace has been held for the first time at the CJF –Child and Junior Fashion exhibition: manufacturers and distributors of clothes and footwear for children took part in it. The participants discussed new ways of dealing with licenses and major market trends. The invited experts provided detailed recommendations on the ways of operating in the ocean of licenses: how to choose the most profitable ones, where to start, what analytics to use, and how to calculate the return on investments. We asked Roman Fedotov, OLYMP Association Director and the moderator of the session, to comment on the results of the session.

“The hall was full during all days of the forum: manufacturers and distributors took interest in the opportunities of business with licenses. I consider it absolutely reasonable. The interest towards the licensed products will continuously grow. During the crisis times, the knowledge and technologies offered by licensed products may turn into a magic wand. Licensing as an emotional incentive to buy is a good instrument.

“Today, the market of children’s fashion is very attractive: customers have changed and children’s demand has changed. Children want to get emotions from the purchase. Such emotions can be provoked by clothes as the most vivid demonstration of the brand loyalty. When people put on t-shirts with their favorite character, they show their love to it. On the other hand, the interest in the Russian animation is growing in the license business: there have emerged a lot of attractive outstanding products with educational functions and new animation series and new characters have appeared. They have already attracted a close attention of clothes’ manufacturers.

“If we compare the profits received from various product groups, we’ll see that the largest profit comes from licensed clothes, and toys occupy the second place. In Russia it is still opposite, although the clothes segment has already started growing intensively. It is good: here we can find new growth areas and new markets. Therefore, it is very important that the license marketplace was held here, at the CIS largest exhibition of children’s fashion.

“We invited various experts; we did our best to gather the professionals of this market: Aleksandr Sablukov, 0+ Media Company, producing a lot of content for VGTRK (Russian TV); Julia Verlina, MOMRI Research Director; Elena Osaulenko, Aeroplan Production Company Marketing Director; Dmitri Zyryanov, Megalicense Sales Director, and many others. We faced a large interest from the market professionals, so we’ll continue our presentation next year.”