Making biz of Licensing plus T-shirts market

While people are shelling out bucks for formal wear, t-shirt market has wooed a lot many retailers to operate in this space only, and Red Wolf is one of them, which deals in pop culture inspired t-shirts. In a candid conversation with License India, Ameya Thakur, Co-founder and Director, Red Wolf explains the USP of this sector.

What made the T-shirt market so appealing for you, that you came up with entire portal?

T-shirts had a lot of space to get in as there were just a few brands like – Tantra, inkfruit which were pretty popular. We started from scratch and initially used our savings to start our company and now it has been almost two and a half year with Red Wolf. The company really started in my bedroom where we would store all the t-shirts, boxes and packages. Eventually we grew out of it and had to rent a space to warehouse our stuff. Initially we started doing five to ten t-shirts a day, which has grown to 130-150 a day at the moment, excluding accessories like badges. We sell through our portal along with other eCommerce portals like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon. It has been very encouraging so far.

What are the plans regarding opening your flagship offline store?

That is not something we really want to get into at the moment. The major challenge for us has been to keep up with the demand as a lot of designs and sizes go out of stock at our portal. At the moment, we are working more on the inventory management part and trying to catch up with the online demand rather than focusing offline. I don’t think we are getting our offline stores anytime soon, though we do retail through a lot of offline retailer. I guess that is the way we would prefer at the moment.

So, eCommerce is actually benefitting you…

Yes, we started off wanting to be an eCommerce company and we got in at right time, when the trend of eCommerce was actually picking up. So yes, Ecommerce is definitely a good space for us right now.

Talk to us about the agreement for breaking bad.

A lot of designs on our portal are taken from pop culture based space where huge fans of movies, tv shows and pop culture. Breaking Bad is one of the best TV shows that have been released in last 15 years. When Bradford got in touch with us, we were pretty excited to do official merchandise for Breaking Bad. With all the detail done, we have recently started implementing this. We have received some designs from Sony Pictures. We are also working with lot of independent designers in India and across the world. Response has been encouraging so far and we are looking to add more and more designs every month.

Were there any challenges while signing for your first licensing deal?

The people at Bradford were good to work with, and we discussed all the terms and line before we actually entered the agreement because we were pretty young company and that was the first time we were doing a contract like this. It was pretty straight forward like there were no hiccups.

Was pricing you part, or you received some guidelines from Sony Pictures?

Not really, though these properties come with a minimum guarantee. The t-shirt pricing was completely left to us. We just had to sketch our plans on contract, but price point was entirely our decision.

What are your future plans? Are you looking to buy rights for any other brand after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul?

Right now we are not looking at any brand as such but for last couple of years we have been dealing with a lot of local music bands and we have been creating their official merchandise and retailing it through our primary website redwolf.in or the secondary portal makemymerchn.in.