The Met’s Licensing Strategy: A Q&A With Beanstalk’s Martin Cribbs

Two people wearing hoodies with a painting on the back stand to look at art hanging in museum
The Met’s licensing projects have included apparel lines with PacSun. Courtesy PacSun

Roman-art-inspired puffer jackets. Perfume recreating the smell of marble statues. Pillows that channel painted Egyptian tiles. These are just some of the recent products released by the Metropolitan Museum of Art through numerous licensing partnerships.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) isn’t the only arts institution that has embraced licensing agreements. From the Louvre’s deal with Uniqlo to the Van Gogh Museum’s line with Vans, global museums are increasingly seeking out brand collaborations. In addition to bringing in revenue, these partnerships help institutions unlock new audiences. The Met’s licensing agreement with PacSun, for example, “blows the doors” open to millennial and Gen Z audiences, according to Martin Cribbs, vice president of brand management at the brand extension licensing firmBeanstalk.

For the past three years, Beanstalk has been working with the Met on licensing partnerships. “Beanstalk has a Rolodex, we’ve got a big infrastructure and we can do all the legal stuff, do all the royalties and accounting,” Cribbs, the account lead for the Met’s licensing program, told Observer. “That’s why somebody like a museum would hire a Beanstalk to help them scale.”

Joining clients like the U.S. Army and Proctor & Gamble, the Met is the only artistic institution currently represented by Beanstalk—it’s the firm’s “crown jewel,” according to Cribbs. But the combination of art and licensing is nothing new for Cribbs, who began his career in global licensing in 1990 while working with Andy Warhol’s estate. “We hired Beanstalk to help grow our business because we’d grown it to a certain point,” he said.

The Met’s brand licensing projects thus far have included collaborations with companies ranging from fragrance line Pura to the footwear-focused Doc Martens to the wallpaper maker Scalamandré. These partnerships are “entirely between the museum and partner—we help facilitate the process and bring quality partners to the table,” said Cribbs. “The Met is ultimately the decision maker.”

Observer caught up with Cribbs to learn more about Beanstalk’s partnership with the Met, the museum’s brand ambitions and how the art world’s stance on licensing has changed over the years.

When did Beanstalk first begin working with the Met?

We started negotiating the agreement in 2020. And then it generally takes about eighteen months before any products get to market, so the first product wasn’t in market until 2021. From the public-facing standpoint, it’s newish.

What are the different types of projects companies are looking for when partnering with Beanstalk?

We do almost a McKinsey-level research and sort of strategy that we create over several months in conjunction with the brands. We conduct that in-depth research, we look at trends and we present a strategy for our clients that takes an approach and has a schedule of products.

The Met wanted us to focus on home decor first. The mantra internally was ‘lead with luxury.’ Now it certainly is broader than that, but that was the overarching ethos when we started.

Have the types of companies the museum is interested in engaging with changed at all over the past three years?

One of the big parts of the mission of the Met is to expand outside of its walls. The whole founding principle of the Met was to democratize access to art. When we started working with PacSun, we were like, is this too lowbrow? Does it fit the strategy?

What’s so awesome and fascinating to see is hip teenagers on the subway wearing Met x PacSun products. Oftentimes, that audience would have no interest in art or no access to art.

Was the Met engaging in this type of licensing before they started working with Beanstalk?

I think they were doing it on a small scale. They have their own store, which is a completely separate business, but they were doing product for the store, and they’ve done some limited licensing. Then they hired Beanstalk to really help them grow that business more expansively and put some professional infrastructure around it.

Beanstalk does all the negotiations and manages the royalties and oversees all aspects of the relationship from the first phone call until the end of the agreement. So they look to us to help expand their business in the U.S., Japan, the Middle East, North Africa.

How does this partnership operate when it comes to a potential licensing project?

In some cases, it’s specific like, ‘We’d love to work with Scalamandré.’ Another way is they’d say we’d love to be in premium furniture and then it’s our job to go and prospect that universe.

Let’s say we reach out to fifty companies, 10 of them might be potential prospects. Five of them may actually make a proposal and then one becomes the licensee. And so it’s Beanstalk’s job to do all the due diligence.

Have you noticed a trend in more museums turning towards these licensing projects?

Going back to Andy Warhol, I think the Warhol estate kind of pioneered the broad footprint in licensing. And at the time we were doing that, and Beanstalk was working on that, museum licensing was relatively small outside of the Museum Store Association.

Over time, art licensing became more popular, breaking revenue, and was very visible. I think that was intriguing to museums. This has become a moment; we’re seeing a lot of licensing from the British Museum and the Louvre and the Van Gogh Museum.

The Met is one of the most important cultural institutions in the world and has a fantastic asset library, as you might imagine. And so the ability to tell stories and have beautiful products is just kind of limitless. We benefit from the trend, but we don’t really see it as riding a trend.

Do you think other players in the art world will now also begin actively pursuing licensing projects?

At the time I was working for the Warhol estate, Beanstalk was doing that sort of business, there was concern in the hallowed halls of the fine art world that somehow that might be problematic or devalue the art in some way. I think that Beanstalk as an agency and the Warhol Estate as an institution were able to take that head on and make fantastic, interesting, cool products that engaged consumers and opened up the audience rather than cheapened it. Over time, I think museums just thought, oh wow, this is a way to earn revenue, it’s a way to broaden the footprint and it doesn’t cheapen the actual art.

I do think that is a trend that sort of opened up art licensing writ large. And I think it’s something that up-and-coming artists or artists who aren’t as established will benefit from.

The Met Museum’s Licensing Strategy: A Q&A With Beanstalk’s Martin Cribbs

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