Living The Red Life - The $6 Billion Man : Bernt Ullmann & His Licensing Empire

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

In todays episode i sit down with Bernt Ullmann, a prominent figure in the licensing and brand management industry, often referred to as the "$6 Billion Man." Ullmann shares insights from his extensive career, including his involvement in one of the largest celebrity licensing deals with Jennifer Lopez, valued at $3.5 billion. He discusses his journey from working with Donna Karan and Fubu to partnering with Tommy Hilfiger and launching Star Branding. The conversation delves into the intricacies of licensing, highlighting its two primary forms—territory and product licensing—and the significant role it plays in business expansion.Bernt offers practical advice for entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses beyond traditional methods like funnels and social media. He emphasizes the importance of creativity and thinking big, citing examples such as Fubu's innovative trade show strategy and Tommy Hilfiger's collaboration with Gigi Hadid. The episode underscores the potential of licensing and strategic partnerships to drive growth and reach new markets, encouraging entrepreneurs to overcome limited beliefs and explore these opportunities. Ullmann also shares resources for listeners to learn more about his work and continue their education in brand acceleration and IP monetization.CHAPTERS01:08 - Introduction to the $6 Billion Man: Ben Allman02:09 - Ben Allman's Career Highlights and Major Deals03:30 - Brand Management and IP Monetization in Fashion04:42 - The Evolution of Fubu: From $100 Million to $400 Million05:55 - Star Branding and The $3.5 Billion J Lo Deal07:08 - Understanding Licensing: Territory and Product Licensing08:35 - Practical Steps for Small Businesses to Start Licensing09:15 - Creative Marketing Tactics: The Fubu Trade Show Strategy10:31 - Celebrity Collaborations: The Tommy Hilfiger & Gigi Hadid Example12:18 - Case Study: The Jennifer Lopez Deal with Kohl's14:09 - Breaking into New Markets with Strategic Partnerships16:43 - Thinking Big: Overcoming Limited Beliefs in Business17:59 - Final Thoughts on Expanding Your Business with Licensing18:27 - Where to Learn More About Ben Allman19:00 - Closing Remarks and Future Collaboration ProspectsConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

Can you in like 30 seconds at a third grade level break down the license model for people that don't really understand it? Yeah so I will do that. I will be challenged to do that in 30 seconds because it's pretty big conversations. The licensing in its purest form is renting out you know an asset and you can technically break licensing down in its simplest form in two categories. One is territory licensing and the other one is product licensing. And territory licensing would be, hey, you have built a great business, say in the US, you can now go to other markets and say, hey, look at this amazing American sportswear brand, look at this great story, look at the traction. Wouldn't you want to replicate this in your territory?

What would you say to entrepreneurs that are listening and kind of putting limit in belief sense and these things don't apply? The first thing I would say is... My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today we have the $6 billion man also known as Ben Ullman. He's a friend of mine, we run in the same circles, we've kind of known of each other for many years and he's been pretty much the biggest licensing deal ever,

a $3 billion deal with GALO. He's worked with many other celebrities and he was partners with Daymond John for a long time running Fugu International, actually helping them expand 100 million to 400 million through wholesale. Tommy Hilfiger, the list goes on. And we're going to dive in today about practical applications around international expansion, creating licensing deals and partnerships and different ways to grow beyond the standard funnels, ads and social media stuff. So a lot of great stuff and no one better to learn from

from the guy that's done over six billion dollars in that area so welcome to the show buddy thank you so much for having me great love being here yes sir so you know we've got to dive into the the six billion dollar man until that's got the audience interested already and uh i you know i'll give a bit of a back before I ask you to give an overview. As mentioned, I got to know who you were on Grant's stage, on the 10X stage. And then full circle, to give the summary, we were just on stage together last week with Steve Forbes and John Mackey on the celebrity panel. Uh, and then, um, you know, we nearly did a merger a couple of years ago that we just realized in the last week together, uh, two different parties that were allowed to come together.

Uh, and then obviously the, the, probably the funniest of all is your, your Spun ended up applying to work for me and, and now works in my Miami office. So yeah, definitely. That's wild. Cool. Yeah. Really full circle so good to finally be be together and be here i i have really spent my whole career in brand management brand acceleration ip monetization and really always with a focus on fashion, celebrity, and entertainment.

And so back in the day, I was a corporate vice president of Donner Karen. I took their international division from $40 million to around $200 million wholesale. And then, as you said, I left there and I joined, he's now the people shark on Shark Tank, Damon John. He had founded FUBU. And as you rightly pointed out, I was president of FUBU International. And Damon has been gracious enough to credit me with taking the company from under $100 million wholesale to over $400 million wholesale. Pretty impressive. I left to join an acquisition team.

The brand that was acquired was Fat Fashions, founded by Russell Simmons, Kimora Lee Simmons. We changed that operating model into all licensing, made the company immensely profitable, driving around 40 to 50 million dollars or between 40 and 50 million net operating earnings on around 850 million dollars retail sales. So that company was acquired. I then partnered with Tommy Hilfiger, his brother, Andy, one other guy, we created a company called Star Branding. The premise being that stars can be brands. And when you partner with Tommy,

yeah, you have to think big. Tommy is not interested in a pretty little, you know, $10 million healthy business. He's a very big thinker, a visionary for sure. So we ended up creating a JV with the largest apparel manufacturer in the world. They're called Lien Fung out of Hong Kong. That JV was called Mesh Music Entertainment Sport Holding. And under that Mesh umbrella, that's when we did that deal you mentioned. It's probably the best known deal we did. It was billed as the largest celebrity deal ever done, valued at $3.5 billion.

And then obviously something funny happens. You announce a deal like that publicly. Turns out every celebrity would like to have a multi-billion dollar deal. So after that, in short order, we did deals with Universal Music Group, with the Rolling Stones, Steven Tyler, American Idol, Nicki Minaj, Adam Levine. Those businesses jumped out to $200 million. Yeah, I love that.

It's a great overview and a great resume and probably makes sense that the audience, why you're called the $6 billion man now. And I guess a few billion of that is just the JLo deal alone. Most entrepreneurs and marketers that I know, and the people I work with, we just you know, and maybe my fault because we focus so much on teaching the basics, which I think are important. Like, you've got to have a website, you've got to have a good product, you've got to have a good offer, you've got to have good email marketing, you've got to run ads, you've got to have a website you've got to have a good product you haven't got to have a good offer you've got to have good email marketing you've got to run ads you've got

to have a brand and social media and obviously they are the foundation but i don't think there's much education on like what comes next right because that stuff will get you to 10 million 20 30 million uh and whatever but then i think eventually it's like, that's when like the licensing models or franchising models and the affiliates and the JVs, all of those things become probably more important because it's, you know, it's easier to expand with all those facets. So can you, in like 30 seconds at a third grade level, break down the license model for people that don't really understand it? Yeah. So I will do that.

I will be challenged to do that in 30 seconds because it's a pretty big conversation, but with very big upside. So you're exactly right. Um, so licensing in its purest form is renting out, you know, an asset. So if you have created a company and you have a brand that's recognized in the mind of the consumer, one of your expansion opportunities is licensing for sure. And you can technically break licensing down in its simplest form in two categories. One is territory licensing and the other one is product licensing.

And territory licensing would be, hey, you have built a great business, say, in the US. You can now go to other markets and say, hey, look at this amazing American sportswear brand. Look at this great story. Look at the traction. Wouldn't you want to replicate this in your territory? And there were, you know, literally hundreds of people that wanted that. David Pérez- So, so how, how, like in a practical way for someone that is a smaller company, like when I see how they can start this expansion, like I like to

give examples of like, if you're selling your product on Amazon, like it's not kind of true licensing or anything, but, but but you know, an obvious expansion method is you now start selling it on Walmart and you start selling it on eBay, for example, right? And then if you have a skincare line, you know, maybe you can partner with a celebrity and then like remake that skincare line to their audience, right? And you can license kind of their name. So what are some examples that are applicable for the kind of, you know, business more doing a couple of

million a year versus the big FUBU? FUBU wasn't always the big FUBU. And I give a lot of credit, you know, to the guys, Damon and the other founders, because when you are a young company and a startup, you know, and you don't have deep pockets to drive the expansion, you have to be creative. So for instance, one trade show, the biggest trade show in fashion used to be called Magic, certainly for menswear, right? So the magic trade show is where everybody comes, including the international buyers. So what the FUBU guys did was they had six sales reps, and basically they said to all of the reps,

this was a brand new relationship. The reps were not even familiar with FUBU. They had been in the outerwear business leading up to this. And they said, hey guys, I want you to invite all of your buyers for the first day at nine o'clock of the trade show. The show doors open and all the buyers come in and one boot and one boot only is literally swamped with buyers. The FUBU boot. And every buyer domestic and international saw this FUBU brand and wanted to learn more.

And this was back in the day when brands actually take orders at the shows and FUBU went home with literally millions of dollars worth of orders, both domestic and just from that show i love this so you know in summary what i've heard so far is international expansion uh licensing and affiliation with like high profile retail brands or celebrities you know filling out a booth that's like the good old fashion out the box gorilla mark thing and if you think about it, how many times do you see you go to Yankee Camp, done a partnership with Disney, and they have this Disney candle range, right? Or you go into Macy's and it's this bedding from Disney or Toy Story or the Avengers, right? That's all stuff that you've been doing for so many years. I think a lot of

entrepreneurs don't think they can ever do that because they're not a Disney. So what would you say to entrepreneurs that are listening and kind of putting limiting beliefs in saying, well, I'm not a Disney, so these things don't apply. The first thing I would say is change your mindset because even Disney started somewhere. McDonald's, ultimately founded by Ray Kroc. Ray Kroc was a milkshake mixer salesman. That's what he was doing for a living. He got an order for the first time ever for multiple milkshake mixers to one destination. And that piqued his curiosity. And as they say, the rest is history. So that was

the beginning of McDonald's. So everybody started at the same place. So that's number one. That's critically important to recognize. That goes for everybody. Nike, founded by Phil Knight, he was a college athlete, started the company out of his dorm with one of his coaches. Every single one has the same story. So that's

number one. Number two, be creative. When Tommy Hilfiger, that's a huge brand, multi-billion dollar market cap now, when he started, they took out an ad, one ad before social media, one ad, and it's referred to as the hangman ad. And what was clever was he was just a little ballsy, pardon my french here uh

so the ad the hangman ad said the four greatest designers for men are and then it said r dot dot l dot dot and everybody knew it was ralph lauren and then it was c up above k but everyone is calvin klein yeah and and then there was P and there was Perry Ellis, who was big at the time, and the last P blank blank and H blank. And no one knew who this Tommy Hilfiger was, right? But the campaign was clever because it piqued everyone's curiosity.

And then it established by approximation, by, you know, the neighborhood, that, hey, the Tommy Hilfiger brand is one of the four biggest brands, even though he was just launching one of the four biggest brands for men. So that's just one way. And then, as you said, the other thing you can do is sticking with the Tommy Hilfiger example. Okay. So he did a great job in men's and he built out the great men's wear collection and he's a guy, which means the brand never had that much traction with the female audience. It was okay, but no one was ever looking to Tommy Hilfiger for the latest and greatest in women's fashion. So he did a collab, just like you were referring to.

Did a collab with Gigi Hadid going back a few years. Gigi Hadid, now supermodel, but very much up and coming. It wasn't inexpensive, clearly, but you can pick your slots and you can offer up some equity instead of offering up money and what the Tommy, the brand got with Gigi Hadid, number one, it got all of a sudden millions of eyeballs from a new demographic, a female demographic. So millions of eyeballs, and then they got the trust of that audience because Gigi Hadid is a fashionista. So if the Tommy Hilfiger brand was good for them, surely it has to be for them and ultimately alone draw millions. So that was the collab. And then I want to touch on one other thing you were saying.

It's just a great example. We talked earlier about Jennifer Lopez, right? And the biggest celebrity deal ever done, valued $3.5 billion. So one might think that, oh my goodness, that's so unachievable. That is such a great thing to have done. These guys must be smart. At least I would like, you know. But no, not so smart. What we did was we walked the floors.

As I said earlier, this is a deal we did with Kohl's. And what we saw was there were literally a ton of Latina shoppers, Hispanic shoppers in the store. And then we looked a little more and we saw no native or organic Hispanic brands. So what we did was we went to their management and said, hey, aren't you terrified? They're like, no. Well, why? What? Well, aren't you just petrified that your business is going to dissipate overnight? No, we don't know what.

So we said, you have, and we pointed this out, all these Latin shoppers, you have no brands speaking to them directly. And they were like, shit. And once we had put that in their consciousness, that was all they could think of, they were petrified. So we we had put that in their consciousness, that was all they could think of. They were petrified. So we solved it with Jennifer Lopez and Mark Antony. That's why that business was so big.

Yeah. So it's about seeing opportunity and solving a problem. And I being the underlying factor too is just then thinking big enough, right? You know, I think it's in the last two or three years when I started really getting focused on going to 100 million in revenue that I really got focused on these things. Because I know when I was focused on getting to 10 million, I was just thinking about my sales team and my funnels and my app, you know. And obviously that's important, but I think i could have got there quicker if i had added these things in earlier um but part was not understanding them and then the second part was just not thinking i was ready or not thinking big enough so i always you know i always say and believe that we're not limited by our knowledge but more than our perception of reality of what's possible so um and i think once

you start doing them then you luckily for most people that breaks that belief cycle and then you that's when you start really getting these big wins compound as you get your confidence up right it's like once you ride the bike for the first time it's much easier to ride it the second time than when it was trying to ride it the first time even's much easier to ride it the second time than when it was trying to ride it the first time even though nothing's really changed you've not in a skill gap in the last two minutes from the first time you rode it for the second right so i think you have to in business so all right well we're we're right there on time at a little over because we covered so much today um obviously we could cover so much more.

So we'll have to get you back in the actual studio at some point to expand the JLo deal and some things we couldn't even cover. But thank you so much. Last question quickly. Where can people learn more about you and find you if they want to learn these things? Yeah, so they can go to go to burntolman.com and my name is b-e-r-n-t-u-l-l-m-a-n-n.com uh i also have uh agency celebrity lifestyle brands.com celebrity lifestyle brands.com so uh either place and then of course always uh now as i anticipate us working closer together they can probably just hit you up rudy and we'll do some stuff together

as well yes for sure all right buddy well it was a pleasure uh i really love the different angles and ideas that we brought into the show today. And if you're listening, push you to think out the box a little. And there was no one better to learn these lessons from. So thank you so much. See you soon. Take care.