Cover Story: Flowhaven

Building a Trillion Dollar Licensing Industry with Flowhaven

The next evolution of licensing

For an industry generating over $300 billion annually in sales, the next big, cumulative wins for the licensing industry don’t come just with time but with constructive, well-timed partnerships that perfectly meet the zeitgeist of consumer demand.

So what’s needed for the licensing industry to hit a trillion in revenue at an accelerated pace? In the trenches of day-to-day operations, most licensing programs are often disorganized and time-consuming and don’t adequately have access to information to generate faster revenue.

It’s not unusual to leave money on the table with limited information simply because of not knowing where the coverage gaps are, whether partners are utilizing all of their rights, or which products should be fast-tracked to hit the launch window. There is a massive amount of data behind every licensing partnership, from financial agreements per SKU to product collaboration to royalty reporting. Since all this information typically exists in multiple sources, it can’t quickly be reported and compared to spot trends and extrapolate, for example, how a licensing program could perform better in different territories and categories.

“Years ago we assumed that ready-made templates or the ability for customers to create custom dashboards and reports within Flowhaven would be sufficient to resolve the problem of lack of business insights to help teams manage their business proactively. However, this was just a step in the right direction. We found that the information must be organized into very effective ready-made dynamic dashboards, so minimal effort is needed to piece together answers the licensing executives need,” said Kalle Törmä, CEO & Founder of Flowhaven.

Flowhaven experienced rapid customer growth through the pandemic, growing to almost 100 top licensors, agents, and licensees. As Flowhaven grew, internal data aggregation, communication, and decision-making became more critical to get right. This period made a few things immediately clear at Flowhaven: global teams located around the world working remotely didn’t have the information they needed to operate to their full potential.

“It made leading teams on different continents and timezones challenging when you don’t have the unified basis of real-time information in an understandable format. It was challenging to understand why something was working in one territory and not in another one. Very comparable to what we found our customers being challenged with,”said Timo Olkkola, Co-Founder of Flowhaven.

Kalle Törmä and Timo Olkkola, Co-founders of Flowhaven

These same themes surrounding centralizing data came up at Licensing Expo in May this year. Similar issues that Flowhaven solved with its own team, ironically, had been cropping up in discussion with prospects and customers.

After numerous conversations, it became clear that the pandemic and shift to remote work have led to teams demanding to see licensing data faster, aggregated in a single location to answer specific questions.

This made Flowhaven focus on its efforts to give faster answers to even the most complex licensing questions.

Starting with the Brand Licensing Europe Show in London this fall, Flowhaven will reveal its new Licensing Analytics platform.

With just a few clicks, Flowhaven’s licensing analytics tool can drill down into key metrics using real-time data.

Flowhaven’s team designed it to transform data into live, dynamic dashboards with actionable insights into licensing operations that are easy to understand at a glance. This gives licensing executives both a comprehensive view of their brand licensing business as a whole and the ability to dive into a single partnership’s sales and service records with ease.

Licensing teams can now slice and dice data any way they want to answer all their questions within seconds.

Here are a few examples of questions teams are answering faster with Licensing Analytics:

• Are we focused on the right tasks?

• Is my team able to service all of our partners’ inquiries in time to hit the launch schedule?

• How is our licensing program performing over time in different territories and categories?

• Are we tracking to hit our quarterly and annual revenue targets? How is this different from what’s currently available?

Traditional licensing program management tools were built to help licensing teams export data to spreadsheets for further processing. They were not designed to answer questions on the spot and take the needed actions.

Most licensing program executives still get this information despite system limitations, but the added headcount needed to manually collect and process it is costly.

Because the process of generating analytics manually is so work-intensive, the data is often outdated by the time the reports are completed.

It’s important to remember, according to Kalle, that in the future, “there will be more variations of types of deals and complex deal structures. Programs will become faster and will require products to get to market quicker. Partners will have more brands to choose from with whom they want to work.

Licensing operations and proof points of success will become a competitive advantage.”