Case Study · Consumer Products · 2017–2019
Zero to £1M.
Building LAIKA's Licensing Engine from Scratch.
In 2017, LAIKA had zero consumer products revenue. Three years later there was a full licensing engine, 25+ global partners, and 150+ products on the market — built on the principle that every product had to be an extension of the film's hand-crafted soul.
280%
Comic-Con YoY sales uplift
3 yrs
Zero to full programme
150+
Products to market
25+
Global licensees signed
£1M
DTC revenue built from zero
The Starting Point
LAIKA was protective of its IP — rightfully so. The studio's first instinct was to resist merchandise entirely. The concern wasn't commercial; it was curatorial. They didn't want products that cheapened the work. They wanted artifacts. That constraint became the strategy. Working with CMO Brad Wald and Striker Entertainment, the licensing programme was built on a single principle: every product had to be an extension of the film's hand-crafted soul, not a commercial derivative of it.
01
The Live Event Laborator
I didn't build licensing infrastructure before knowing what fans wanted. San Diego Comic-Con and the Portland Art Museum became the R&D laboratory — real audiences, real purchasing behaviour, real data on what resonated and what didn't.
The first products — limited-edition NECA figures and Funko Pops — proved the thesis immediately. Fans valued creative integrity over mass-market volume. They weren't buying merchandise. They were acquiring objects that felt as considered as the films themselves.
Image — Comic-Con
Learning first hand what consumers react to ©LAIKA LLC
SDCC delivered a 280% year-on-year increase in consumer product sales. That data shaped every subsequent licensing conversation. But before the programme could scale, it needed a moment of genuine cultural legitimacy — a product that signalled to the wider market that LAIKA belonged in serious collector and fan culture, not just as a niche animation curiosity.
That moment came with the USAopoly partnership and the Coraline Monopoly game — a fully realised, beautifully produced edition of one of the world's most recognisable board games, built entirely around the world of the film. It established the programme as operating at a level of craft and ambition that most studios' licensing arms don't reach. The expanded Funko Pop line served a different but equally important function: it placed LAIKA characters in the same cultural conversation as Marvel, DC, and the major video game franchises. That's not just distribution. That's a statement about where the studio stands in the culture.
Categories that scaled successfully across the programme: high-end collectibles (NECA), apparel, home goods (Mondo), and games (USAopoly). Each partner was selected for their ability to maintain the quality standard, not just their distribution reach.
Creative integrity over volume. Every product required studio approval against a style guide that reflected the film's aesthetic DNA. No exceptions.
Category discipline. Partners were assigned categories based on demonstrated capability, not just appetite. Licensing a category to a partner who couldn't execute at the required quality level would damage the programme more than leaving the category empty.
Event-anchored launches. New products were introduced at events where fan response could be measured in real time, before committing to full production runs.
280%
YoY increase in consumer product sales.
02
The Licensing Architecture
Once the proof of concept was established, the licensing engine was built around three principles:
"We weren't selling merchandise to an audience. We were giving a community a way to own a piece of the world they already loved."
The academic evidence backs this up. Research in the Spanish Journal of Marketing found that brand trust — built through genuine community engagement — positively affects repurchase intention and word-of-mouth, both directly and through the community itself. The LAIKA consumer products programme worked commercially because the community was real first. The trust came before the transaction.
References
Anaya-Sánchez, R., Aguilar-Illescas, R., Molinillo, S. & Martínez-López, F.J. (2020) — "Trust and loyalty in online brand communities." Spanish Journal of Marketing – ESIC, 24(2), 177–191. Brand trust built through genuine community engagement positively affects repurchase intention and word-of-mouth, both directly and through community trust itself. DOI: 10.1108/SJME-01-2020-0004
Mills, M., Oghazi, P., Hultman, M. & Theotokis, A. (2022) — "The impact of brand communities on public and private brand loyalty: A field study in professional sports." Journal of Business Research, 144, 1077–1086. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.02.056
Consumer insight methodology: layering event data, partner data, and museum retail data to make product decisions
Cross-functional management — production artists, museum curators, external licensing partners, CMO
Licensing strategy that protects IP integrity while scaling commercially
Using live events as structured R&D rather than one-off activations
Building a revenue-generating division from zero inside a production studio with no prior commercial products infrastructure