Deal Terms That Go Into a Brand Licensing Agreement

In this video, I describe what the key deal terms are for a brand licensing agreement and how they are documented. This video illustrates Step 5 of my 8-Step Brand Licensing Process [Signing Your Dream Team – Segment 1]. You can view more of my videos on the Brand Licensing Process on my YouTube channel or on my videos page.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Pete Canalichio, and welcome to the brand licensing pre-launch. You’ll recall in video 5, Hugh Simpson and I talked about signing your dream team. So this is the stage you get to after you’ve defined what category you want to license, which are the prospective licensees that have met your due diligence requirements, and have defined the scope of the opportunity. You now want to define specifically the deal terms that are going to go into your contract. You’ll recall in the last video, I spoke a little bit about those deal terms, but as we talk about these, what the next step is is actually defining them in a deal term summary, which will then be signed by both the brand owner and the manufacturer. So the important pieces of information in this include first off, who the proposed licensee is, what their address is, what specific trademark they’re licensing, what kind of covered products that they’re going to be licensing, so what specific category it is that they’re going to be taking your branding, putting it on to what those authorized channels are. Is this the mass-market? Is this Internet? Is this television shopping? Or is this department stores? Then you look at the territory, you know, if you’re looking at the country of Great Britain, or are you looking at having a whole region like Europe? And then you look at specifically defining the term of the agreement. When does it start? When does it end? Is there any provisions for extending the term? And things like what are the insurance requirements? So as you go through all those deal terms, you’ll want to document them on a deal term summary, and then you’ll share that summary with the prospective licensee, have them review that, and then sign off on it. And you’ll find as you do this, there’s probably going to be a series of back and forth as those deal terms get defined, because it’s always interesting when you put something on paper–it looks a little bit different than when you spoke about it in the first place. So that’s signing your dream team. This is an important component in it, and we’ll come back in a short while and talk about the second most important piece. Thank you.