It Came From BLE… with Pink Key Licensing’s Richard Pink

Richard, thanks for making time! Can you talk us through a product – or partnership – that originated from a chat at BLE?
The last year that BLE was at Olympia, we had a stand on the ground floor in the brands section. At the time we had Kellogg’s, Pringles, Pan Am and SLUSH PUPPiE – which was just beginning to build. A rather unassuming Frenchman came onto our stand; he didn’t have an appointment and he was quite complimentary about the work we had done. We liked him immediately.

He told us that his brand had been with an agency for a while and he was looking to change direction. He thought the work we’d done with Kellogg’s was a good template for what he was trying to do from a vintage point of view. He wasn’t giving anything away so I asked him what the brand was… Then it got interesting.

He was the brand manager for The Laughing Cow – a brand that no more than two weeks before I had stated was more or less a perfect fit for our portfolio and declared my love for it. It got even more interesting when he said he also represented Babybel and Boursin. After I’d delivered my ‘du vin, du pain, du Boursin’ line and he’d finished rolling his eyes at my accent, we agreed to discuss whether we could work together. Long story short – all the Bel brands have been on our BLE wall ever since!

Amazing! And what makes BLE such an effective place to facilitate those kinds of ‘meets’?
Licensing is a funny old world built around retail buying windows and other deadlines. You never quite know when retailers, licensees or agents are looking for brands – or whether they are simply trying to exploit what they already have with no room for anything additional. But BLE is the one place where you know everyone has their ‘buying’ hat on. Everyone is looking for an opportunity or a point of difference.

BLE is the only place in Europe each year where there is a chance to look at what you are doing, what everyone else is doing, and maybe run into an opportunity you’d never even thought of… There is nowhere like it.

And if you could wave a magic wand, what product or partnership do you hope is kickstarted at BLE this year?
Well I’m going to be dull on this question and refer you back to my answer of question one! This year our agency rights have been expanded for all the Bel brands beyond just UK, and we are now looking for partners right the way across Europe. We’ve had some success with the brands so far – but if we could expand this further through new licensees and colabs this would be a great outcome for us!

Absolutely. Richard, huge thanks. And worth saying, Pink Key can be found at B279 at BLE this year! Thanks again.

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