Most licensed brands can tell you their royalty income, but fewer can tell you how their brand actually performs on Amazon – which categories are growing, which licensees are protecting the brand and which ones are quietly eroding it.
That gap in visibility is bigger than it sounds.
For licensed brands, Amazon is often the single biggest commercial window into how the IP is really doing, and most are managing it with a fraction of the data and control they’d expect anywhere else.
So, for our latest Beyond the Listings session, our CEO Andrew Banks sat down with Jonathan Newton, our COO, Travis Chappell, our Head of Vendor Services, and Matt Wilson, Systems and Online Manager at Rainbow Designs, to talk through what’s really happening when IP meets Amazon.
And the conversation made one thing clear: most licensed brands are managing a fraction of the commercial picture.
The fragmentation problem
In bricks-and-mortar retail, brand experience is owned, with a retailer’s merchandising team bringing every licensee’s products together under one roof, one tone and one consistent customer journey; whether that’s the dozens of licensees sitting underneath a single property like Peppa Pig, or a hero spot built around a key seasonal moment.
But on Amazon, that role doesn’t exist.
As Jonathan put it during the session, no one – not the licensor, not Amazon, and not any individual licensee – is responsible for how the brand comes together as a whole.
The result of this is visible across some of the world’s biggest IP.
Globally recognised brands can have genuinely excellent representation in one product vertical and total chaos everywhere else, their official product sitting alongside gray market imports and copycat listings.
And there’s nothing to signal the difference to a customer who just wants to buy into the brand they trust – some major sporting and entertainment IP, for example, barely has a meaningful brand presence on Amazon at all, despite commanding huge demand.
The thing is that customers don’t see licensors, licensees or category boundaries, they just see the brand.
And when that experience is fragmented, it’s the brand that absorbs the damage, not any single seller.
Where the commercial risk really sits for Licensed Brands
It’s not just a brand perception problem either, it’s a margin issue too.
Andrew shared an example from early in Venture Forge’s work in the licensing space: a contract that required the brand to launch a new product line every year.
It was completely sensible on paper. But it meant liquidating the previous year’s stock – and that stock resurfaced on Amazon at heavily discounted prices, sitting directly alongside the new launch with no way for a shopper to tell the difference between this year’s design and last year’s clearance line.
In another case, it took just three new sellers entering the market within two days to push a product’s price down to barely above cost.
Neither of these is a one-off.
They’re symptoms of a wider issue; licensing structures that were designed for a retail world where pricing and distribution sat with one or two controlled partners, now operating in a channel where anyone can list against a barcode.
Why Amazon makes IP protection harder than retail ever did
As Travis pointed out in the session, this isn’t an accident of bad luck, it’s structural.
Getting into a bricks-and-mortar supply chain takes real investment and a direct relationship with the brand.
But getting onto Amazon takes a seller account and a manufacturing contact who can produce something that looks close enough to the real thing.
That lower barrier to entry is exactly what opens the door to gray market goods and IP infringement at scale; and it’s compounded by how interconnected Amazon’s marketplaces are.
A regional distribution agreement that restricts sales to one territory can be undermined entirely by a listing created years earlier in a different market, because Amazon’s global catalogue doesn’t respect those boundaries the way a traditional distribution agreement assumes it will.
Matt also described how this plays out operationally at Rainbow Designs.
When a license changes hands, or new product needs to be matched correctly to an existing barcode, getting the brand association right on Amazon isn’t always straightforward – and if it isn’t passed through the correct channels, the result is a drawn-out authorisation process that has to be escalated to the licensor for sign-off before it comes back down again.
Here, the timing risk is real for brands; a major launch can go live across YouTube, paid search and other channels, with the Amazon listing itself showing only one or two live images because of a compliance hold or a rogue listing already sitting on that ASIN.
The team then has to scramble to fix it while the campaign – and the spend – is already running.
For licensed brands specifically, that’s not just an inconvenience, it’s a moment that exposes the IP, not just the produce.
The missing commercial owner
So why doesn’t this get fixed?
It’s not because licensors or licensees aren’t capable – quite the opposite in fact because, as Matt’s experience at Rainbow Designs shows, well-run licensees can build genuinely strong, brand-consistent experiences within their own category.
The issue is often that nobody’s remit extends beyond their own patch; licensees are understandably commercially focused on their own sales and licensors, in many cases, see their job as done once the IP has been licensed and the royalties are coming in.
As Jonathan noted in the session, most licensors simply haven’t applied the retail merchandising discipline they already trust in physical stores to their Amazon presence – because, on Amazon, there’s no equivalent function asking the question at all.
Brand stores: the most underused commercial lever
If there’s one practical opportunity raised repeatedly in the session, it’s the Amazon brand store.
Brand Stores are fully owned real estate – no competitor advertising, no distraction, just your brand.
And the data consistently shows stronger conversion, higher average transaction value and stronger lifetime value from brand store traffic than from standard search or PDP journeys.
Yet some of the most recognisable IP in the world has no meaningful brand store presence at all – even where one exists, it’s often treated as a one-off build rather than a living asset, refreshed once and then left untouched for years.
Retail has been monetising prime space for decades – end caps, freestanding display units, premium catalogue positions and there’s a clear parallel for licensors: charging licensees for hero placement within a brand store around key commercial moments – a new film release, a major signing, a seasonal moment – the same way retail charges for prime physical space.
It’s a model that barely exists on Amazon today, and a genuine opportunity for licensors prepared to think about their brand store as commercial real estate rather than a static shop window.
On the licensee side, Matt described an ongoing process of brand refreshes at Rainbow Designs that includes seasonal storytelling, back-to-school moments and two-way conversations with licensors about tone and direction.
It’s proof that when licensor and licensee actually collaborate, the brand store becomes something worth maintaining, not just building once and forgetting.
The data opportunity most Licensed Brands are missing
Perhaps the most striking point from the session: many licensors don’t actually know how their brand performs on Amazon – they’re entirely reliant on whatever licensees choose to report upward.
That’s a significant gap, because Amazon data can show far more than historic sales; revealing everything from which categories are underdeveloped and which adjacent brands are winning ground to the products which are frequently bought together and where seasonal demand is shifting.
For licensors managing a portfolio of IP, this is data which should be informing licensing strategy – the difference between reacting to whatever licensees tell you and actively directing where the next commercial opportunity sits.
There’s a creative dimension to this too
One thread we’ve deliberately kept light here is the role AI is starting to play in licensed brand content, and particularly in how quickly brands can now produce seasonal, on-brand creative compared to traditional photography cycles, and the open question of whether licensor approval processes can move fast enough to keep up with it.
It’s a substantial enough topic that it deserves its own piece, but it’s worth flagging now: the conversation around AI and licensed content is moving quickly, and governance models built for a slower creative cycle may already be behind it.
Our take
The brands that get this right aren’t the ones with the most resource.
They’re the ones who recognise that Amazon needs the same commercial discipline they’d apply to any major retail partner – clear ownership, consistent standards and a coordinating function that sits between a licensor’s ambition and licensee’s execution.
As Jonathan summarised in the session, the strongest model is a brand working closely with its core licensees and a third party capable of bridging both sides – providing licensees with the technical expertise to execute well, and giving licensors the governance and control they need to protect their IP.
When that works, everyone benefits. The licensee sells more, the licensor protects and grows the brand and the customer gets the consistent experience they assumed existed all along.
The Bottom Line
For established licensed brands generating meaningful revenue on Amazon, fragmented representation isn’t a cosmetic issue, it’s lost conversion, diluted brand equity and commercial decisions being made without the data that actually matters.
Amazon is, for many licensed brands, the single biggest commercial window into how their IP is really performing.
The brands that treat it that way – with central ownership, real governance and a genuine view of the data – are the ones who’ll get ahead of a problem most of the sector hasn’t fully woken up to yet.
If you manage a portfolio of licensees on Amazon and want a clearer, more commercial view of how your brand is really showing up, the Venture Forge team is here to help – get in touch today.