Volodymyr Kostandi, BDO at WP Merchandise!
Today the world faces a challenge it was not ready for. Many companies with a half-century history began to leave the markets, declaring bankruptcy. And it’s needless to say about small and medium-sized enterprises.
WP Merchandise!, thanks to its experience, experts, and, of course, enthusiasm, knows how to act in the most unpredictable situations. The company has managed to establish itself as a reliable and stable partner that complies with all conditions of both manufacturing and delivery of products. It constantly develops not only its production capabilities but also the ability to analyze and predict what will be popular in the next years.
Volodymyr Kostandi, BDO at WP Merchandise! shares three main principles of successful work during the pandemic.
The coronavirus was not the first problem that licensed merchandise had faced. Not so long ago, in the video game market, companies primarily earned money by creating and selling their games, as well as by internal gaming operations. The licensing business was of secondary importance for them. However, now the vector is changing, and for some companies, license sales have begun to prevail.
Since the market of licensed merchandise is fast-changing, in the very beginning, we have developed three main principles for ourselves. Thanks to them, we not only work in our usual mode but also have contracts with such giants as Warner Bros., Ubisoft, Bandai Namco, and Valve Community Built.
The first principle is constant development
Constant development is a solid foundation for business. Adhering to this, we started close collaboration with experts in working with the community, licensing, and game development. Only having complete information about everything, we can customize all our business processes for productive work.
Furthermore, our strengths, in addition to manufacturing highly-detailed premium plush merchandise, are related processes that occur before the product launch: risk analysis, analytics, communication, forecasting, and assessment of opportunities. These processes have become the core of our second principle.
The second principle is forecasting
Thanks to the analytics that we receive from the internal R&D department, we can ‘look into the future.’ Comparing the data with the opinion of the community, we get a strong idea of what is popular now and what will be popular tomorrow.
Multicomplex cross-analysis through all the parameters of interaction between games, gamers, communities, up to the emotional perception of the game and merchandise in general – all of these allow us to create popular products.
The third principle is to make a cool product
Our company consists of enthusiasts who care about their work. That is why, being inspired by the emotions of fans, we blur the line between the real and virtual worlds and create something more than just merchandise. Our products are the wishes of the fans materialized in reality.
We work and develop in three directions: official collections of plush toys based on popular video games and comics, souvenir plush products for brands, and mascots or attributes for esports teams.
After the quarantine measures reduction, we expect an even greater surge in demand and customer activity. The reason is that the video gaming market in the world has significantly grown during the quarantine because people have started to play more. Accordingly, interest in merchandise has increased too.
