National Trust’s brand licensing manager on launching its first childrenswear collection and moving into the wildlife care space.
The museum, heritage and institutions sector has endured its own challenges throughout this year’s lockdowns – including venue closures, key exhibitions put on hold and social distancing measures to incorporate.
All of this means the importance of licensed products is higher than ever.
LicensingSource.net catches up with some key names in the sector to find out their views on the year to date.
Today: Rebecca Stanford, brand licensing manager, National Trust.
“In spite of the challenging circumstances 2020 has presented to every organisation and individual, we are really proud to be moving forwards with some exciting collaborations across our core licensing categories.
Most recently, we have launched our first childrenswear collection for autumn/winter 2020 with Frugi, a UK leading ethical and organic children’s clothing company. We are also delighted to be moving into the wildlife care space through a new collaboration with CJ Wildlife.
Lockdown certainly brought its challenges across the organisation and our licensing programme was not exempt. We had to quickly adapt to managing our portfolio of licensees (which is fairly sizeable, at just over 30 accounts) with a heavily reduced team (due to furlough arrangements).
Our priority was to support our licensees through these extreme trading conditions, yet also be mindful of our new working relationships and support them with product development and marketing launches to ensure we didn’t miss opportunities later in the year and into 2021.”
This feature originally appeared in the autumn 2020 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
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