Fitzwilliam Museum Enterprises’ Len Dunne on building the Cambridge brand in international territories and expanding into different categories.
The heritage sector – from museums and galleries, through to universities, gardens and stately homes – continues to gain momentum when it comes to licensing, with 2022 having seen some high profile product launches and collaborations.
LicensingSource.net catches up with some of the companies operating in the sector.
Today: Len Dunne, ceo, Fitzwilliam Museum Enterprises.
“The Cambridge team has continued to develop and deepen agent partnerships which in turn has generated apparel deals to establish the Cambridge brand in international territories.
This is demonstrated by several retail firsts for us in 2022 – a pan-European fashion deal managed by Plus Licens; a collab with Mackintosh just launched in Japan via Ingram; a capsule collection of collegiate inspired designs with Korean brand HAZZYS through our agent Infiniss; as well as apparel launches in Latin America supported by our agent Big Hands, and North America through Bradford.
We are now identifying partners to work with in secondary and complementary categories across the trademark programme, as well as the content from museum collections.
FME’s product development team successfully launched a gift range inspired by the striking black and white animal illustrations of Cambridge zoology professor, Hugh Cott who wrote the definitive book on camouflage in nature and advised on its military use in WWII.
The isolated monochrome imagery is offset against a hot colour palette of saturated colour, which produced eye-catching displays in the museum shops, generating a positive customer response and plenty of sales data to support a licensing proposition. The Hugh Cott illustrations (pictured) have been packaged and added to the museum collections portfolio and will be a key content introduction for our global network of agents for PD and retail in 2023.
Establishing the apparel category across multiple territories is well under way, and our agents are now looking at back to school, toiletries and stationery. In addition to University branded athleisure ranges, we are also looking at technical sportswear inspired by Cambridge’s rich sporting history combined with the increasing emphasis and importance of sport for well-being.
We would also like to increase the focus on content from the museum collections, highlighting themes such as Evolution (Darwin) and Exploration (Scott Polar) – both important collections that inform current research into climate change, as well as develop Cambridge’s red lion specifically for sports related product categories.”
This feature originally appeared in the autumn 2022 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
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