I Run a Public Company and Partner With Household Names. Here’s What CEOs Get Wrong.

Brand partnerships look straightforward from the outside. You find a name people recognize, you attach your product to it, and the awareness follows. That’s the theory, anyway. Having built collaborations with brands like Reebok, Eddie Bauer and Nautica while running a publicly traded company, I can tell you the reality is a lot more nuanced.

Your brand has to be ready before the partner shows up

The biggest misconception I see is that a partnership is something you pursue when you need a boost. CEOs treat a brand deal like a shortcut to awareness they haven’t earned yet. But the key to forming a successful partnership is doing it at the right moment, and that moment is when your brand or core technology has reached some maturity in its own right, is genuinely delighting your core constituency, and is ready to find new audiences. Not before.

We learned this firsthand. Early on, we did a collaboration with a well-known football player. We spent a huge amount of time and money developing a custom sunglass collection with him. But when it came time to get it out to market, we were missing that awareness punch that is really needed to get a product over the line. He didn’t have the time, we didn’t have the resources, and on top of that, we hadn’t yet built our own following. No strong email list, no real social presence. There was not much to fall back on.

In retrospect, we moved a little earlier than we should have. It did give us a leg up in certain negotiations down the road, so it worked out in the end. But it’s not an approach I’d recommend, because a partnership can only build on what’s already there.

Getting in the room when you’re not the biggest name

Once you have an established product line, you’ll find that licensing opportunities start coming to you. But if you’re going after a major brand like Reebok, you will likely need the right contact to even get considered. That’s just the reality.

My advice: select four or five brands that you think are a genuine fit, reach out for licensing terms and make a decision based on the best balance of awareness you think the brand will bring and the cost of the license. You’re not chasing the biggest name available. You’re finding the right fit at the right terms.

As a company of just under 20 people, I’m involved in most of the major partnership negotiations myself. My sales and marketing teams frequently bring opportunities for me to review, and we make a lot of decisions as a team. But on something like a new licensing deal, I’m in those early conversations. At our size and stage, that’s where the CEO needs to be.

The negotiation always comes down to three things

When you get into actual negotiations with a major brand, the conversation comes down to three things: royalties, exclusivity and brand rights.

Where things tend to get complicated is on the marketing side. Co-branded and licensed products can create real ambiguity about how the partnership is communicated to the consumer. We ultimately settled on what I think of as the Intel Inside model, using “Powered by Lucyd” as the tagline that accompanies our licensed products. That way, the consumer knows a proper smartglass developer is behind what they’re buying. It protects our brand identity and makes the value proposition clear, even when the product is sitting on a shelf next to a household name.

My advice is to get those three terms right before you get into anything else. Everything downstream depends on them. The marketing question, including how your brand actually appears on the finished product, is worth thinking through early. It’s easy to gloss over and very hard to walk back.

Retail traction is the metric that tells the truth

Simply put, the measure of whether a partnership is working is retail traction. Are your normal customers interested in the product? Are you attracting new merchandise buyers or D2C audiences through the collaboration? That’s the proof.

If you aren’t seeing new traffic and conversions as a result of the partnership, it isn’t doing its job. You’d have been better off putting that energy into developing your core brand.

We had to reckon with this when it came to our Eddie Bauer and Nautica lines. We started selling those collections direct-to-consumer, but our Lucyd and Reebok brands were outperforming them there. Bigger retailers were where the real interest was. So we realigned those brands as custom options for our largest retail clients and pulled them from D2C entirely. The data made the decision easy.

If I had one piece of advice for a CEO just starting to think about brand partnerships, it would be this: try to find a partner that can genuinely bring mutual benefit to both companies, not a one-way street where one party has all the responsibility. A real partnership is one where both sides are committed to building a bigger business together than either one could on its own. That’s the only kind worth pursuing.