Like the teams actually competing in the FIFA World Cup, the journey for Something Inked (asi/329822) started around a year and a half ago.
That’s when the Counselor Top 40 distributor started focusing more on its licensing and retail products with customers like ESPN and Sports Illustrated.
“Because of those projects, it opened doors for things like the World Cup,” says Bill Feldberg, executive vice president of marketing and business development for Something Inked.
Something Inked is now an official licensing partner for the tournament and is the official player towel and poster licensee with products in Rally House and Fanatics locations across the country, as well as the various fan festivals in host cities. They also secured rights for apparel like T-shirts, hoodies and hats.
Feldberg says that Something Inked also has a special program with Walmart to sell the poster art on towels in more than 500 stores. He estimates their products are in 12 stadiums, 30 fan festivals and 40 pop-up stores nationwide.
To achieve a job of this scale, Something Inked worked with several supplier partners. While the end-buyers were retail stores rather than companies doing giveaways, Feldberg says that the process was not too dissimilar from working in the promotional space.
“The end-goal is the same: Get the product to the stores or event,” Feldberg says. “Whether it is a promo T-shirt or a custom retail product, the only thing that changes is the sale price. The rest is all the same essentially.”
Word of mouth and referrals go a long way, he adds.
“We were introduced to the buying and product team through a prior client,” Feldberg says. “Once we met and talked about our abilities and lanes of distribution, all the parts just lined up.”
Feldberg estimates that when all is said and done, they’ll have moved products numbering well into the six figures and then some. With this many supplier partners and end-buyers, it’s a lot of plates to keep spinning, especially for an event as high profile as the FIFA World Cup.
To keep things moving, Something Inked relied on its own freight booking company, which alleviates some of the shipping hassle and potential worry over delays. Distributors can still scale the idea to their own campaigns, taking Feldberg’s advice to control what you can, be ready with a plan B and rely on supplier partners to handle their side of things.
Feldberg recommends that distributors or decorators control as many of the potential variables as possible – like artwork, decoration and shipping – so that if and when something comes up, they can pivot and stay “nimble,” in his words, to keep the order moving and ensure that it arrives correctly and on time, no matter how large it is or how many destinations it’s bound for.
This, of course, requires plenty of preparation, just like the teams in the World Cup have been training for quite some time before the tournament actually begins. It also requires teamwork. Feldberg credits Something Inked’s Chief Sales Officer Todd Schneiderman – a member of the Counselor Power 50 list of the industry’s most influential people – and Vice President of sales Mike Zagurski, as well as the company’s entire licensing team, as the drivers of the program.
“It’s a lot of moving parts from designs, approvals, production and then selling into retailers,” Feldberg says, “all moving parts that we have been aligning and working with for the past 18 months as we grow our licensed sales divisions.”
