Inside the Met’s expanding retail licensing program

If you’ve pondered the intersection of museums and retail, chances are it was concerning museum stores. Much of the retail-related revenue that museums earn, however, is on products that are not sold in their stores. Through licensing deals, museums sell brands the rights to use imagery from their collections, or the logos of the museums themselves, and the licensed products tend to be sold by those retailers.

One institution that’s stepped up licensing efforts in recent years is The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2022, for instance, Pacsun released its first collection under an ongoing licensing deal with the Met, with sweatshirts, T-shirts, and socks, featuring the work of artists including Van Gogh and Henri Fantin-Latour, as well as the Met’s logo.

Also in 2022, the Met completed a licensing deal—a “collab” in fashion-press parlance—with Dr. Martens, whose chunky-soled shoes and boots featured the work of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Products licensed by the Met run the gamut in terms of both price and target demographics, from a $10 pair of socks by Pacsun for that brand’s typically Gen Z consumer, to a $144,200 table by furniture maker Abner Henry for luxury consumers.

What prompted the Met to step on the gas when it comes to licensing? Is it only about generating revenue, or are there other motivations? Are there product categories that the museum is gravitating to for licensing partnerships, and others that have it reaching for the 10-foot pole?

For answers to those questions and more, we sat down with executives at the Met as well as Beanstalk, the brand extension licensing firm it’s been working with since 2020.

Paint by numbers: Linda Morgenstern and Martin Cribbs are both brand management VPs at Beanstalk who’ve helped the Met shape its licensing strategy over the last four years.

“Martin and I worked very closely with [the Met] along the way to come up with a strategy that made sense about which categories they could enter, where they had permission to play, and how to embark on the process,” Morgenstern told Retail Brew.

While brands occasionally approach the museum, “most of the work that we do is proactive,” Cribbs told Retail Brew.

Beanstalk, naturally, considers how well a product would lend itself to featuring a work of art like a painting. If the team was approaching a luggage brand on the Met’s behalf, for example, it would point out that “luggage is a canvas—it’s a beautiful empty space,” Morgenstern said. Not only would she point out that a suitcase featuring a masterpiece would look “amazing coming down the baggage claim” conveyor belt, but also that it would be an “elevated line” for which the brand could charge more.

At the risk of stating the obvious about the value of licensing deals to brands, ideally, this brand would fetch a premium price for the carry-on that turns out to be an even greater margin for the brand—even after paying the licensing royalty—–than the same model in its regular product portfolio.

Home is where the art is: One area the Met has given particular focus to in recent years is home furnishings and decor, inking licensing deals with brands including Anne Gish (bedding and home accessories), Scalamandré (wallpaper and textiles), and Pura (home fragrance).

One of the more intricate deals, which was announced in September, is with Samsung’s The Frame, a smart TV that has a matte finish option that lends itself to displaying paintings when the TV isn’t playing. Through the deal—which weds licensing with content distribution—Samsung consumers can choose among 38 pieces that are part of the Met collection to display on their televisions.

“This is a pretty steep ramp-up we’re going through,” Josh Romm, head of global licensing at the Met, told Retail Brew. “But it’s not shotgun by any means. It’s very strategic, very targeted.”

Some categories are off-target.

“We stay away from the sin industries of…wine and spirits,” Romm said. “We could do it, but should we do it? Absolutely not.”

While Romm declined to say how much the Met is earning from licensing deals, he did note many of the deals are still in their “very early” stages and that the real “revenue impact” will come as the partnerships, which tend to be multiyear deals, not one-and-done drops, put more products in the market.

But the program can also help fulfill the museum’s mission, Romm noted, pointing to the Gen Z consumers buying Met-licensed clothing from Pacsun.

“It’s all of a sudden making artwork and wearing art on their clothing cool and aspirational, and it lives in their worldview,” Romm said. “We’ve really activated the Met’s message among that demo.”