ZAG’s Julian Zag on hitting over $1bn in retail sales for Miraculous, increasing its ecommerce business and eyeing up further growth.
From Belgium to the US, LicensingSource chats to a selection of licensors and agents based outside of the UK to find out their takeaways from 2021, what they see as the biggest opportunities and challenges for licensing moving through 2022, their aims and what word they would use to describe business in both the year just gone and the current one.
Today – US: Julian Zag, evp global operations and head of consumer products, ZAG.
“Despite the pandemic, the past two years have been incredible for ZAG. In fact, as of last year, we’ve hit over US$1 billion in retail sales for Miraculous – Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir worldwide. We also expanded our content offerings with the launch of Ghostforce, an original gender-neutral series for 6-10 year olds.
We are so excited about our Miraculous US$100 million+ animated feature to debut in 2022 with some of the world’s best known companies on board as cross-promotional partners. We’re also currently in production on season five of the series, plus we plan on announcing a new series under our ZAG Heroez banner, an umbrella brand franchise that brings together the superheroes from ZAG’s animated properties.”
“For Ghostforce, we closed agreements with several major partners, with toys coming from ZAG Lab and Playmates Toys, plus yet to be announced partners across publishing, apparel and costumes among others. The first products will debut in 2022.
Due to Covid, retail saw many challenges over the past couple of years, but we are fortunate to not have been affected. We increased our business on e-commerce, which is why we established the new ZAG Global E-Commerce division which manages on a day-to-day basis all of our e-commerce efforts alongside our major partners, licensees, and retailers, plus reinforced and grew our team across the globe.
We see more growth ahead as direct to consumer retail continues to accelerate with kids due to its strong resonance with the current generation who feel empowered in their decision making, who crave instant gratification and expect anything, anytime, anywhere.”
This feature originally appeared in the spring 2022 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
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