License the Name

In 1973 the most celebrated designer in America sold his business and his trademark for sixteen million dollars. The agreement let the buyer put his name on products he did not design, and barred him from using his own name on anything without permission. He never got it back.

He did not license his name. He sold it. There is no route back from that, and the fact that his name was his name made no difference at all.

License the Name dissects ten cases where that distinction decided everything. Not biographies. Deal anatomy: who granted what, for how long, in which categories, and what happened when the relationship changed.

Inside: the fragrance licence, disclosed in a public securities filing, that renews forever at the licensee's sole option. The three billion dollars of retail sales behind a company that sold for a fraction of it, and why that gap is not a bargain. The designer who sold his name and his services as two separate contracts, and kept working. The estate that discovered in court it had never owned the right it had been licensing for decades. The eighteen-year-olds who gained the right to license their names in 2021 and started signing immediately. And the consent form that now governs a synthetic version of a person.

Four terms set the price of any name deal: term, territory, category, and the guarantee. Change one and the same royalty rate is a completely different agreement. Most people negotiate only the rate.

Every figure is labeled disclosed, reported, or estimated. A warning applies throughout: licensing coverage reports retail sales, while licensors receive royalties on a wholesale base, and the two differ by an order of magnitude.

One chapter argues the opposite case, because a book that only argued for holding on would be advertising.

The Money Playbook, Book Three.