TV Time

We always have pads of paper and pen sitting on the coffee table (and every counter, nightstand, desk and more) and they get a lot of use in our house. One thing I can never resist is writing down memorable lines from whatever we happen to be watching on the tube (that's the beauty of On Demand, you can rerun it a few times). Here, in no particular order, are a few that have some relationship to our creative world…

“It turns into ‘just say your lines and then get off the stage’. It’s kinda sad.” – Dustin Hoffman on the reality of art as a business

“I didn’t have what they needed today, but I’m not done by any means.” – a rejected contestant on The Voice

“If you’re looking where everybody else is looking then you’re looking in the wrong place.” – Mark Cuban on Shark Tank

“She wants to know all the secrets in the How To Be Successful handbook, but sadly that book does not exist.” – Adam Levine on The Voice

“They are not right. They are exactly as I wanted them, but they’re not… it.” – Peggy on Mad Men about some design ideas

“The old business models are irrelevant. You need to find your place in this new market.” – a record producer on the series Nashville

“It’s not OK to just assume that everybody knows the right thing to do, because they don’t.” – from a CBS Good Morning story on internet plagiarism

“She is fitting into a pair of shoes that people have seen worn before.” – Rob Thomas (Matchbox 20) on The Voice about lack of originality

“Fashion will always be about balancing art and commerce.”
– Michael Kors on Project Runway

“If ten people insist you’re a horse, it’s time to buy a saddle.”

– Jack Rosenblum

“No deal is always better than a bad deal.” – Mark Cuban on Shark Tank

“I had no way of knowing that there was madness in what I was doing.” – Sidney Poitier on becoming an actor without any experience

“Luck is only important as far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you've got to have talent and know how to use it.” – what Frank Sinatra said about luck

“You’ve got to look at how our business is now – you need to get visibility to make it and that’s really hard to come by.”  - from The Voice

“Whenever you feel you are pushing it (the design) into a place it doesn’t want to be, then pull back.”  -Tim Gund on pushing the envelope (Project Runway)

“There are two kinds of products – those that are revolutionary, and those that are like other things out there." - Lori Greiner on Shark Tank

 

“I didn’t make the rules, I just know them.” – a music producer on Chasing Nashville about the importance of image

“Everybody who walks into the Shark Tank is fully committed – but that’s not enough by itself.” – Mark Cuban

“Creative is not a science. It’s about design AND telling stories.” 

– from The Pitch 

Now, who said there's never anything good on television?

Hey, Remember Me?

There have been some (shocking but actually not surprising) statistics floating around the net lately, reportedly from the National Sales Executive Association, that illustrate how important follow-up skills are to sales success:

48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect
25% of sales people make a second contact and stop
12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop
Only 10% of sales people make more than three contacts
However…
2% of sales are made on the first contact
3% of sales are made on the second contact
5% of sales are made on the third contact
10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact

These statistics don’t mesh very well with the fantasy of being discovered, an overnight success, or taking the industry by storm, because that’s exactly what those are – fantasies. 

Why do we care? Because success in art licensing requires selling, and successful selling requires action – targeted, repeated action that not only delivers your designs to the right people over and over again, but also allows you the opportunity to gather information at the same time. (Think: keep asking questions…). Many artists become frozen in place trying to learn everything about the industry, and while learning as much as possible can be part of a great plan it works best when coupled with activity. We are in a learn-on-the-fly business in no small part because what you are learning will change as the business evolves - there are few hard and fast rules left anymore for those making a living as a creative.
 
Another way to look at this is through the lens of relationship selling, or RS. One of my favorite commandments of RS is “the product is not the product”, meaning the relationship has to build first and THAT is the product you are working on. People buy from people they like and trust, and a sale is usually the outcome of building a relationship over time – hence the many contacts and the necessity of following up. Your clients have many suppliers to choose from and many variations of a theme will often work for them – but there is only one production slot. Artists say they don’t compete with each other because the art is all unique, but that can be a mistake because you ARE competing for every opportunity to place a design. You want to be the person they think of when they need to fill that spot, and one good way to stay top of mind is to keep working your follow up.

It's Not Only What Will It Be, But Where Did It Come From?

There has been some recent hoopla on the net regarding an artist who went public about several of her designs being copied (and it seems like they were) by a well known gift supplier. Any number of bloggers have posted their admiration and support for her bravery, and some big retailers actually cut ties with the gift supplier because of it. But there is a fly in the ointment – an art critic matched up the designs to several photographs widely available on the net, and they do match. Perfectly. And now people are researching her past work and matching some of that up to other photos…oops…

I am both amused and dismayed that so many artists who quickly ripped into the manufacturer have gone silent now that it has been revealed that the artist’s (un) original designs were traced, apparently without permission or attribution, from other people's photographs. The infringing manufacturer's position is indefensible, no question there - but so is that of an artist tracing copyrighted work and calling it their own. Nobody should get a pass here. And what of those other licensees with legitimate licensing agreements that are now looking at their product lines as potential infringements (against various photographers) and are waiting for the other shoe to drop? If it does those costs could be catastrophic.

There is no future in maintaining a "poor artists against the mean manufacturers" attitude, it will very quickly poison your relationships and ultimately your career. Here at Two Town we truly like the vast majority of the companies and people we work with and can count many good friends among them, and it seems I find myself advocating  consideration of the licensee side of things far too often because many artists automatically jump to the “manufacturers are bad” side of things. Yes, infringements do occur but the truth is you are way more likely to be ripped off by another artist than by a potential licensee.

There is a lesson to be learned here, and it's an unpalatable one - in this biz of art and product licensing sometimes it IS all about the money, and that fact will pop up on either side of the equation. It can lead to hard knocks for sure, but you can usually duck them if you stay original, do your research, write good contracts and use your smarts.

Snippets - Dallas Meets Atlanta

One of the great things about the gift markets is that you can interact with a wider variety of people than you will see at Surtex or Licensing. The mix of owners, reps, art and licensing directors, sales managers, retailers and our fellow artists and agents makes for some wonderfully diverse viewpoints. It also made Dallas and Atlanta ripe territory for snippet picking as you will see. It seems that while most people feel business is improving, the sting of the last few years has not gone away and “proceed with caution” is still the word of the day:

“It’s a lot of time and work to intro a new product, plus someone has to keep following it all the way through to the launch.”
– owner of a gift company

“The market is telling us something different than what we had expected on this line and you have got to listen to your market.” – about making some responsive line changes

“Do you want to make a statement or do you want to make a deal?” – an agent about difficult artists

“The shelf life of a piece of art is so much shorter. Where we used to get 4 or 5 years out of a good seller, now after one year we are looking to cycle it out of the line because sales have already dropped.” – owner of a home décor company

“Have you seen the crazies on there lately? I keep adding to the list of artists I’m never going to work with.” - an art director talking about Linked In

“The problem is they’re not asking anybody who has a qualified opinion – it’s like asking your mother over and over again “Am I pretty?” – an agent about artists evaluating other artists’ work on social media

“We have learned that our salespeople are not enthusiastic about being the first to market – they’d rather see it somewhere else first.” – an art director about fresh new concepts

“There are so many ideas coming at us now, especially with Pinterest and all that, that we couldn’t possibly do all the good ones.” - owner of a gift company

“I don’t know why they don’t have more artists mingle with the sales reps because it energizes the reps so much to meet them.” - a sales VP

“Our focus is on branded lines now, we really don’t do anything with individual designs anymore.”

- licensing exec at a big gift company explaining their new focus

“We would blow off this show if being here wasn’t a requirement to keep our (prime) location for the January show.” – an exhibitor in the Atlanta temps about the summer show

“I don’t care about recognition or awards or any of that stuff. I design for a particular market and what I care about is whether they buy it.”  - a well known licensed artist

“We don’t just want it to sell in, it needs to sell through. Selling through is what validates a product.” – sales mgr at a large gift company

“We had it priced at 11.00 wholesale but the packaging wouldn’t hang on the hook, it needed to be stronger. The redo pushed the price up to 14.00, so now it’s almost 30.00 retail and that was too much.” – about problems marketing a product

“I am so tired of seeing all these products made with horrible art and hackneyed phrases they pulled off the internet.”
– a licensing agent

“Here’s the problem: everybody and their brother has a product in this category, so it’s incredibly competitive and the margins are really thin. There is just no room to pay royalties anymore.”
– licensee explaining why they buy some shelf goods for their line

“She doesn’t seem to have anything new – what, is she on hiatus?” – art director’s remark (that you never want to hear!) about a portfolio

“I get really tired of this “we’re all sisters in this business of art licensing” thing. I am not giving you my client name just because we both have a uterus.” – a successful licensed artist

“I hate to say it, but in this business you are only as good as your last product.” – owner of a gift company

“It’s not just ceramics - everything is more expensive. We are using a lot more wood, paper and printing instead of sculpts because of the price.” – owner of a gift company

“It’s Trade Show 101 – lot’s of light and color.” – a gift show exhibitor about their bright and colorful display 

And my favorites:

"Every time a new or relatively unknown artist talks to me about developing their "brand", marketing their "brand", and how they're such a unique "brand", I just want to set myself on fire." – an art director

“I'm taking a few moments to recover from the wind burn I just got from [a gift company] whipping thru my portfolio.”

– an artist at the Atlanta Mart