As the licensing industry emerges from the pandemic and speeds product to market to meet rapidly-changing consumer demands, there is an even sharper focus on global trends. This shift was the topic of the panel “The New Rules of Retail” Licensing Expo last week.

“The pandemic made a lot of trends very global,” said Ed Labay, senior vice president and general merchandise manager for licensing and marketing at Hot Topic. This is partly due to increased engagement with social media platforms like TikTok, he says, which make trends go global at faster rates than ever before.

This faster pace is also being fueled by the growing use of print-on-demand and fan art that was once heavily policed for trademark infringement but is now employed by brands as signposts of growing trends, said Jennifer Sandberg, owner and designer at JS Product Design. Sandberg has worked on Strawberry Shortcake as well as Fall Guys, which is expanding on June 21 to include Nintendo Switch and Microsoft’s Xbox in addition to PCs and Sony’s PlayStation 5 with new licensed products from Moose Toys.

Beyond this new pace, personalization will be very important moving forward, Labay said. “People are not going to follow the same trends as everyone else and there is going to be a desire to have things a little bit different, and that is going to cause companies to dig deeper into licenses.”

For example, when Nickelodeon revived Blue Clues in 2019 with a new host, Hot Topic carried products tied to both the new series and delved into the original stylebooks to create nostalgia-tinged items to attract fans of the original episodes (which ran for 10 years and six seasons starting in 1996). And WldBrain’s Strawberry Shortcake, which debuted on greeting cards in 1972, licensed streetwear supplier Dolls Kill for apparel that launched last fall, putting a new twist on a brand that bowed as a Netflix series  (“Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City”)  on April 15.

“The trends now require a different way of thinking. The licensees and licensors have to work very closely together and they have to be responsive,” said Sarah Swindell, owner and designer at Watermelon Creative. “It’s not like it used to be where everything was done upfront. It is about getting a few things right, changing a few things, and getting the products to market.”

Bringing products to market in time to catch fast-moving trends is being driven by POD. For example, Hot Topic uses 10 different suppliers—including Delta Apparel’s DTG2Go service—to keep pace with consumer demand. And that requires licensors to be flexible with the use of their brands and open to interpretations of them that stretch the boundaries of a style guide.

“We are being a lot more flexible in allowing licensees to create their own assets,” Swindell said. “They have to submit them for approvals, but we want differentiation and a different perspective because one size does not fit all anymore in licensing. We want to give licensees the opportunity to redraw the artwork themselves within certain parameters. There is a call for fan art and sometimes that is commissioned because it is that good. There are people doing their own versions [of a brand], so why not pull that in?”

In creating new versions of a brand, licensors are relying more on collaborations to broaden a property’s appeal.

“My whole job has changed to be in lockstep with the licensees and if there is a trend, they will let me know and I make sure they meet the time requirements,” Sandberg said. “Both licensors and licensees are really coming together and we are seeing the result. Everything we have done in the past 10 years in style guides and getting fan art requires licensors to be open to different interpretations of their characters in artist collaborations, and that has gotten them ready for the type of speed [that is now required].”