Despite the rapid growth of the sports licensing business in the last decade, Fanatics founder and executive chairman Michael Rubin believes his business and the industry still have room to more than triple in size.
“My goal is not to take an industry from $15 billion to $17 billion,” Rubin said. “I want to get from $15 billion to $50 billion. And we haven’t shown our ability to radically change the size of the industry, but that’s what I want to do.”
Fanatics’ Michael Rubin wants to grow the sports licensing industry to $50 billion.tony florez
The early growth was easy, he said, but the next level will take a bolder strategy of bringing unconventional brands into sports.
“It’s share of closet,” Rubin said last week on stage at the CAA World Congress of Sports. “We’ve got to get a much bigger share of closet.”
For instance, Fanatics “brought Vineyard Vines into the business,” he said, and Rue La La, also owned by Rubin’s Kynetic. He went on to describe a future when a full range of lifestyle and luxury brands are in sports licensing.
“You bring all these great brands in the industry, now you’re growing the share of the closet,” he said. “So I think that’s a big opportunity for us. I think we’ve grown the industry, but not as much as I’d like to grow the industry.”
The early, rapid growth of Fanatics came by picking the low-hanging fruit: fulfilling strong fan demand for basic products they couldn’t easily get, and by finding growth by leveraging big moments in sports to drive sales. But that’s marginal.
Rubin believes Fanatics, which is on pace for about $2.6 billion in sales in 2019, can “easily be a $10 billion business in the next decade,” he said.
