BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
Joe Bruin has breached the Great Wall.
You can find him on the sixth floor of the
New Century Department Store in Shanghai and the fifth floor
of the GuaYou FangZhong Department Store in Beijing.
In fact, in dozens of boutique shops and retail
spaces all over China (including Hong Kong), Japan, Korea, Singapore,
Mexico and in the United States, around $33.5 million in retail
sales of UCLA-branded merchandise — everything from T-shirts
to sunglasses that bear the UCLA label — is being rung
up annually.
The university receives royalties of 6-9% of
the wholesale price of that merchandise, which is manufactured
in each country and sold by companies licensed by the University
of California Regents through UCLA Trademarks and Licensing,
an enterprise of ASUCLA.
While UCLA products have been sold in Japan
since the late ’70s, it wasn’t until last summer
that the gateway to China opened up, with a dozen UCLA boutiques
going rapidly into department stores there. They have been so
successful the licensee wants to open 60 to 100 more, said Cynthia
Holmes, director of Trademarks and Licensing.
“UCLA products have a certain cachet,”
Holmes explained. “It’s the appeal of the Southern
California lifestyle, the beaches, Hollywood and a world-renowned
university known for its great educational and athletic programs.
No other university has that comprehensive a package. It’s
a dream, if you will, that we’ve been able to turn into
a product.”
With Asian markets growing, the European licensing
program being rebuilt and goals set for expanding into Central
and South America, said Holmes, “we’ve reached the
point where we now have the opportunity to present the university
in a more cohesive manner.”
That’s also the vision of David Lundberg,
director of strategic alliances in UCLA’s Development
Office, who was amazed when he first stumbled across a stand-alone
UCLA store in a Shanghai mall while visiting the city.
He has since been talking to units such as
UCLA Extension and business partners about expanding the university’s
presence beyond products in these stores.
“In China, UCLA is regarded as one of
the premier American universities,” Lundberg said. “We
could be making incredible inroads into Asia just because we
are UCLA.”
While shopping, customers might peruse an exhibit
on Extension programs, surf the UCLA Web site or watch a video
on UCLA research. Today a T-shirt, but tomorrow a chance to
sign up for a distance-learning class?
“There’s an opportunity here for
us to transcend just being a commercial product,” said
Holmes.
