Entertainment Character Licensing and Partnerships - Where to Start?

[Allen]

My wife had an excellent idea a few years ago and bootstrapped the development of an entertaining educational video for children who needed to wear an eye patch for amblyopia or "lazy eye". The purpose of the DVD was to entertain children who needed to wear an eye patch with a full-length DVD featuring sock-puppet characters who also had to wear an eye patch. She actually got the idea when our son, who had ambyopia and had to wear an eye patch, saw a cartoon pirate wearing an eye patch on television and then rushed to put on his eye patch in order to play along.

We have since sold over 3000 of the DVDs, however as the finance guy of the operation, we quickly realized that with a limited advertising budget and no repeat customers (Who buys a DVD twice?), it has been difficult to scale.

Below is the link to the website:

Home

Since reading TMF , I have decided to revisit this business model as one of my projects. However, I want to attack it from a different angle and perhaps pursue a partnership with a production company that has the ability to use digital animation, scale and perhaps branch out into other videos focused on children with other medical conditions, i.e. allergies, asthma, hearing aids, etc.

Another option is to try and license the characters as the furry little "Bjort" characters seem to be the most popular and make the children laugh while singing songs, etc.

I don't know where to start so I'm hoping for some guidance from the forum. I've performed some Google searches on entertainment licensing, character licensing, etc., however I would rather try to find a working model and try to repeat the process.

Thanks!

 

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[bernieshawn]

Not sure if you've seen this thread yet, but this one is legendary:

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/inventing-innovating-licensing/39983-licensing-game.html

EDIT: Sorry, at first I thought you wanted to license someone else's character for your DVDs (the thread linked above is targeted towards that). Still might be worth a read though.

 

[Mike Kavanagh]

Instead, why not switch over to a subscription model? Have monthly releases, etc...

Use some money to target people on Facebook. Get a copyright on the characters as well.

 

[TedM]

We have since sold over 3000 of the DVDs, however as the finance guy of the operation, we quickly realized that with a limited advertising budget and no repeat customers (Who buys a DVD twice?), it has been difficult to scale.

Allen, this is an interesting topic. what happened in the interim?

 

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