4 minute read
Museums & Galleries
The Art of Heritage Licensing
The V&A sits at the heart of Museums & Galleries’ art licensing with cards, journals, social stationery, gift packaging, and gifts “We’re all incredibly proud of our long-standing and successful collaboration with the V&A. With their continued support - and the ever-increasing demand from our customers - the V&A cards, stationery, gift packaging and gifts range has become a core pillar of the Museums &
Galleries collection”
As long term customers of Museums & Galleries (M&G) know, the company’s annual sales brochures have grown bigger and bigger under the auspices of proprietors Alan and Debbie Williams, since they purchased the company in 2013. This year, the brochure is split into two: one for Everyday product and the other focusing exclusively on Christmas.
Much of this growth has been driven by M&G’s imaginative and skilful reinvention of its stationery, social stationery and gift packaging ranges, and successful diversification in recent years into the exciting world of gifts.
A powerful creative motor of this impressive development has been M&G’s licensing relationships with an array of prestigious national museums - foremost amongst which has to be the Victoria & Albert Museum in London: one of the world’s greatest museums of art and design.
“A key factor of the V&A’s relevance for us is its founding mission of leveraging great art and design, both past and present, both British and International, across very many disciplines, to inspire manufacturers like M&G today,” says M&G licensing manager Eddie Clarke. “It is a brand which inspires respect and desire in every sector of the marketplace and wherever it appears.”
M&G creative director Ben Dorney adds: “We’re all incredibly proud of our long-standing and successful collaboration with the V&A. The museum is an inspirational resource in terms of imagery, obviously, but also with regard to the experience and insight of the licensing team.
“With their continued support - and the everincreasing demand from our customers - the V&A cards, stationery, gift packaging and gifts range has become a core pillar of the Museums & Galleries collection.”
The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of more than 2.8 million objects that span over 5,000 years of human creativity.
The museum holds many of the UK’s national collections and houses some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.
Founded in 1852 from the profits of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the museum’s Kensington headquarters now covers 12.5 acres
and 145 galleries. Young V&A in east London is a branch of the museum, and a new branch in Stratford - V&A East - is nearing completion. V&A Dundee opened in 2018.
M&G’s V&A collection is built around a series of different greeting card ranges: both everyday and Christmas (the V&A’s first director, Henry Cole, invented the Christmas card).
Out of this large pool of imagery, popular designs are developed into gift wrapping products and the core stationery lines of journals and notebooks are a significant part of M&G’s stationery lines. Current stand-out products include Far Eastern designs and British Arts and Crafts designers, especially Charles Voysey and William Morris.
The compilation of star designs across product groups creates great opportunities for co-ordinated looks in-store and in personal gift selections and presentation.
Gift packaging especially makes the most of the V&A’s strengths in decorative repeat patterning in fabrics and wallpapers, with M&G creating suites of matching sheet and roll wrap, gift tissue, and gift bags.
During the pandemic, M&G moved away from its original paper-based products and embraced fabrics: namely, organic cottons. The company now has a growing range of high-quality tote bags and pouches, with more developments in this area on the way.
Again, the partnership of superlative design work from the V&A’s archives, together with modern product design and manufacture, have woven their magic, with stunning colour reproduction on the cottons - matching the paper products too. 2023 will see M&G release more bottles and insulated mugs - another product area which has had an encouraging start.
The latest product to market has been V&A jigsaw puzzles. The classic Victorian design ‘Birds of Many Climes’ by Charles Voysey stormed the best seller list, being the most popular by far of an enormously successful launch range.
The last word goes to Lauren Sizeland, Head of Licensing and Business Development at V&A Enterprises: “The V&A celebrates creativity and champions excellence in design, and we hold a rich and diverse archive that offers ongoing inspiration to our licensing partners.
“Our long-standing collaboration with M&G has blossomed over the years, as its innovation and constant exploration of different production techniques provides refreshed and inspired design ideas.
“This has enabled us to expand to a wide range of beautiful design-led stationery, greeting and gifting products, which we hope will continue to appeal to retailers and consumers alike, whilst supporting the Museum’s mission to make art available to all.”
