LicensingSource chats to Maxine Lister, head of licensing at Natural History Museum about how its licensing programme continues to develop, challenges, award wins and focuses for 2022.
“For NHM licensing, 2021 has been a strong year despite it being such a challenging environment. We have had some fantastic new collections launch in the children’s apparel category with both John Lewis and Marks & Spencer, and our most recent launch with Desmond & Dempsey saw us launch luxury dinosaur pyjamas for both adults and kids, which has been incredibly well received.
For the wider Museum, as you might imagine, 2021 has been a difficult year, however, since reopening, we have welcomed over 936,000 visitors, which has been wonderful to see and means we’re well on our way to hitting our visitor target for the year.
Even while closed, the show went on with our engagement teams developing new ways to digitally engage with our established audiences, while welcoming new audiences from across the world. Our live stream event for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards was a great opportunity for us to connect with global audiences in a celebration of nature and the power of photography.
Since reopening, the licensing team has gradually started to go back into the Museum a couple of days a week and have also started meeting licensees and prospective licensees at the Museum, which has been lovely after the months spent on screen only and we are looking forward to more in the coming months.”
“The focus for the rest of 2021 is to support our licensees where we can in what is still a very challenging environment. Moving into early 2022, we have some significant new launches that will move us into different categories that we are really excited about, and we cannot wait to see them launch into the market.
In terms of target categories, we are looking forward to meeting licensees from the toys and games and arts and crafts categories as we feel this is an area in which we could develop some fantastic products.
Immersive events is also an interesting area for the Museum. I believe the experiential category could be a really interesting one for the licensing team in the future, especially once we extend into global licensing over the next couple of years. This could be a great opportunity for the Museum to reach a wider audience and different demographics that we aren’t already reaching.”
This feature originally appeared in the autumn 2021 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
