Sports Illustrated — Licensed Brand Execution at Retail

Licensed brand work is a different discipline from brand design. The identity already exists, it belongs to someone else, and your job is to make it survive contact with manufacturing, retail buyers and a dozen product categories without drifting. Nothing about it is yours to change. Everything about it is yours to protect.

At Sakar I held Sports Illustrated and Sonic consistent across 10+ product programs distributed nationally through Walmart, Target, Kohl's and Best Buy. That meant reading licensor brand guidelines closely enough to know not just what they said but what they were protecting, then applying them across an entire assortment — colour, typography and logo treatment holding correct from the first concept through to production files and print.

The hard part of an assortment is not any single package. It is that a shopper sees them together on one shelf. Products designed in isolation look like a collection of items; products designed as a system look like a brand. I built the visual systems that got adopted across multiple products so the assortment read as one thing, and worked those systems through to production-ready artwork rather than handing off a concept and hoping.

The work also had to sell twice — once to the retail buyer and once to the shopper. I built the buyer-facing presentations that aligned internal sales teams and carried programs through retailer approval, which is where a licensed program either gets placement or doesn't.