Selling licensed merchandise without collecting IP complaints

The catalog had grown the way fan merchandise catalogs do: a license for two leagues, an assumption that team names in a title were fine, and a long tail of products referencing clubs the seller had no agreement with. Every month something came down, and roughly once a quarter a complaint escalated far enough to threaten the account itself.

The cost was not only the removals. Constant enforcement risk made the seller nervous about investing in any listing, so the properly licensed products — the profitable half of the business — were as thin and neglected as the ones that were about to be taken down. The account was being run defensively across a catalog where half the problem was self-inflicted.

We reconciled the catalog with the paperwork and then invested in what was left.

• License audit against the catalog — every listing matched to a specific agreement, territory and product category, which revealed how much of the tail was unlicensed.
• Unlicensed references removed from titles, images and keywords, including the oblique ones, rather than waiting for a complaint to find them.
• Retractions pursued properly — each open complaint resolved with the rights holder directly, with evidence of the corrective action.
• Licensed lines rebuilt — team and competition vocabulary, sizing, seasonal timing and imagery treated as a real catalog for the first time.

All fourteen complaints cleared and no listing has been removed by a rights holder since, taking the account off the risk register.

Revenue from properly licensed lines doubled, which more than replaced the unlicensed tail that was deleted — total revenue still rose 6% while a third of the catalog disappeared, and the $28k a month that sits outside the licensed lines is plain unbranded merchandise that never needed a license. That is the whole trade: the removed products were producing a little revenue and all of the existential risk, and the licensed ones had never received any attention because nobody wanted to invest in a catalog that might vanish.$