Give and Keep’s Manoj Dayalji discusses brand updates and BLE plans

Manoj, you have decided to exhibit at Brand Licensing Europe this year. What made up your mind to do this?
Thank you for the opportunity to share Ian. Lovely to catch up with you again ahead of BLE 2025. It was in the earlier part of the year, after completing a brand values exercise for both of my brands – Give and Keep, and Sam The Dancing Digital Angel. We experienced a significant breakthrough in being able to piece together the various brand assets we’d compiled over the last several years and communicate them with absolute clarity for the brand licensing industry.

So you’d managed to crack something that was perhaps holding back the licensing potential of the IPs?
Yes. It was something we were aware was lacking and would inadvertently impact our ability to have meaningful discussions with industry professionals with a high level of confidence… Like attending a job interview with your shirt hanging out, scuffed shoes, and no tie! We may be highly qualified, but doubts would naturally be there because of the poor presentation.

Once our website had been completed, we felt a sense of relief and quiet confidence about Give and Keep that we had never experienced up until now. So we decided to exhibit at Brand Licensing Europe.

What are your key objectives at the show?
Increasing Give and Keep’s brand visibility on an international platform, connecting with potential licensees and key decision makers in the brand licensing community – and planting seeds for animation and gaming collaborations. It would also be lovely to come away from the show securing several licensing deals to get Sam The Dacing Digital Angel off to a flying start. The other incredibly important objective is to ensure that we take lots of cool pictures with the mascots and characters for our collection of BLE photos gathered over the years!

Since we last spoke, what has been going on with Sam The Dancing Digital Angel design-wise?
We have compiled a comprehensive collection of designs featuring Sam The Dancing Digital Angel which can now be seen at https://giveandkeep.com/licensing. Sam is an incredibly versatile character that can easily accommodate a variety of retail sectors with ease.

We plan on taking design ideas for the main categories of stationery, accessories, greetings and apparel, along with some designs for some other poplar retail categories to demonstrate the possibilities with Give and Keep for our guests at BLE.

I know you are very focused on the digital marketplace. How have you ensured you and your brand are “match fit” to succeed and stand out on digital platforms?
Although we are focused on the digital marketplace for the medium to longer term projects, we also love the idea of starting our licensing journey with traditional tangible products too. To ensure we are ‘match fit’, we have created a concept platform game titled Super Sam.

This showcases how Sam can easily transition from being a flat two-dimensional character into a dynamic digital character within a gaming experience. Sam can be seen fighting against sadness and unhappiness in the digital world, staying true to our brand experience on digital platforms.

Sam can also be found on GIPHY, where you can now share a dancing GIF of Sam saying ‘hello’ in over 108 global languages, along with some other cool and fun entertaining GIFs. We also have a diverse bank of digital animations displayed on our Youtube channel and our portfolio website.

It’s a congested market, so what helps your brands stand out?
Having observed the licensing landscape, we can see there are many characters which mostly seem animal-themed, however, none appear to resemble a cute chunky little angel wearing a nappy! We are pretty sure Sam will not only stand out, but also be instantly recognisable with his unique identity as a cheeky chunky fun loving angel.

How do you ensure that you stay “on brand” and “on message” as you develop more assets?
Staying on brand has been a bit of an evolutionary process for Give and Keep. Many of our initial visuals were very experimental and not finished to the standard we would have preferred. However, being a completionist and not a perfectionist in the early stages of creating brand assets, the focus was more on volume, intending to fine-tune as we went along.

Having said that, I think we are almost there now with regards to layouts, colours and fonts. Using a bright white background for example seems to work very well with our branding as this is synonymous with angels who are often depicted as beings of light or surrounded by a bright white light. We are often told the use of a white background makes our branding look cool!

With regards to the challenge of staying on message, this was addressed more recently as we had just completed a brand values exercise. From that, it became apparent how our brand values of fun, freedom and joy flow through all that we create and communicate. And just as our visual assets went through a fine-tuning evolutionary process, our messaging will go through the same. Our approach with many of the assets we have developed has been one of giving ourselves permission to ‘fail forward’ and continue to refine and develop as we move forward.

You have your eyes on the global marketplace. What do you think makes Sam The Dancing Digital Angel a brand that can travel internationally?
Sam seems to have the magical ability to make people beam with a heartfelt smile from all backgrounds and cultures. Sam understands that when you greet someone in their own language, it instantly makes people smile, so with this is mind, a dedicated Give and Keep campaign website called The Hello World Project has been put together. You can see more on that here: https://giveandkeep.com/hello-world-project. It has been amazing to see how well Sam has been received in the other language-speaking regions.

I am sure you have had a lot of advice and input from the licensing industry in regards to character and brand development. Are there two or three pieces of advice you have acted upon that you could highlight?
The journey to date has been very much of seeking out information and figuring out the puzzle as we go along. Although it would be amazing to have a ‘mentor’, we fully appreciate that we are at the early stages of our brand licensing development journey and understand that we have to simply ‘stick it out’ like most entrepreneurs do until we gather momentum. Lack of knowledge should never be a reason to not pursue a goal, so we keep marching forward with a gentle determination and a smile – reassured by the feelings Sam will be generating in the hearts of all those who interact with him.

Although I can’t think of any specific advice for character development, most of the information we have obtained has come from reading various articles published by industry professionals and, more recently, from podcast interviews. After processing the knowledge, we then look for ways to incorporate the elements that work for us that are aligned to our brand values of fun, freedom and joy.

How do you think things are shaping up at the moment retail wise? How do you see your brand “fitting into” retail?
Retail seems to currently be undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the rise of omnichannel shopping and the integration of technology. Consumers are increasingly blending online and in-store experiences, demanding convenience and personalisation across all channels. We think Sam and our suite of dancing digital angels would be a great fit on the customer journey for all these various aspects of retail, transitioning from the physical to digital experiences with ease.

In terms of our specific retail path, keeping a lower barrier to entry and minimising risk for retailers in the early part of our journey would appear to be the best strategy to start our licensing journey. This will also give us the best opportunity to become accustomed to the different stages and processes involved of putting deals together, before embarking on more ambitious projects.

Returning to BLE, are there some specific companies or categories of company that you would like to meet at the show?
For our short-term objectives, we would love to get some stationery, accessories, apparel or even greeting card companies on board. For our mid to longer-term objectives, it would also be great to plant seeds for the animation and gaming components of our brand.

Sam The Dancing Digital Angel is a delightful market-ready character who has a unique charm that instantly makes people fall in love with him. By collaborating with Give and Keep, companies will gain access to a fresh and versatile character brand with a very unique identity in the current marketplace. It transcends cultural barriers seamlessly, while resonating with a variety of audiences ranging from children to kidults. Combine this with Give and Keep’s ability to innovate, adapt, animate and gamify our dancing digital angels to current market trends with ease – the commercial possibilities are truly limitless.

If you are excited by the prospect of working with a brand with such strong potential, please do come and visit us in the Design and Discovery section at stand AD16 where one of our angels will be more than happy to speak to you.

Great! Thanks Manoj.