"Your old sketchbook drawings could be earning you money" - An illustration licensing chat with Margo Tantau

The Good Ship Illustration

Tania interviews Margo Tantau, a licensing expert and founder of Tantau Studio, to explore the world of art licensing for illustrators. They

Key takeaways

• Margo Tantau's 'secret weapon' is showing art already applied to products, such as plates or tea cozies, to help art directors visualize the final result.
• Royalty rates for gift products typically hover around 5%, though they can fluctuate based on the scale of the retailer and volume of sales.
• The industry is seeing a pushback against AI-generated 'slop' as premium brands specifically seek out work that shows the unique 'hand of the artist.'
• Trade shows like the Spring Fair in Birmingham and the Licensing Expo are essential for establishing face-to-face connections with buyers.
• Artists can leverage existing catalogs by reimagining old drawings as part of a cohesive, product-ready collection.

Main topics

• Art licensing fundamentals
• Royalty and payment structures
• Product development strategies

Notable quotes

If you're the artist and you're in the store... You're imagining it. Show it.

Conclusion

This episode serves as a practical guide for illustrators looking to d

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:25) Hi, everyone. This week's guest is a good friend of The Good Ship, and it's Margot Tantor. You might know Margot from her own creative community, The Foundry, or you might have caught her podcast, Windersill Chats. That's how we found her, and we recognised that she was flying her very own freak flag. So if you listen to her podcast, you'll know it's where she champions and supports creative entrepreneurship. She invites artists, authors, makers and all different kinds of designers to chat with her. And what fascinates me about Margot is she's also a lot of things. She's an artist herself. She's also an illustration agent, a product developer and a licensing wizard. She has a 360 degree industry experience with product development, publishing. speciality retail, manufacturing and the realities of building different types of creative careers. I knew that she'd also had some experience in retail and wholesale, but she had a career in the manufacturing business, leading creative teams for leading brands in home decor and the gift industry. And she's helped hundreds of artists to connect their work with those kind of opportunities that we're all looking for in homewares and gifts. And now, as the founder and the creative director of Tantau Studios, she represents a roster of illustrators and surface designers and champions artists and the value of creative work. We always regard Margot as our licensing whisperer, and she's one of the brilliant minds who contributed to our business club. And we're going to be relaunching the business club this September. And the conversation we have today about opportunities in licensing for illustrators is a little taste of the kind of expertise that's waiting for you in there, because she actually does a one hour class on licensing for illustrators. But more on that later. Right now, let's get into what licensing is. Could it work for you? How does it actually work? And how do you build a real and recurring income from the art that you're already making? Margot, welcome back to The Good Ship. Speaker 1 (2:35) Hey, Tanya. I'm so happy to be here. I'm so honored. Come Speaker 2 (2:39) back and sit on the couch. This is the second visit, isn't it? Because we've had you talk to our students for licensing on the business club course as well, which is going out again soon. So you're like, you're a friend of the family now. Speaker 1 (2:51) Oh, I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased. And in my mind, I hear the little music and the birds and the, I'm at the waterfront because I love when the... podcast comes around new and I get to hear that. So just hearing it in my mind right now. Speaker 2 (3:07) Oh, I'm so glad it's familiar. The seagulls are actually out there today. And I was thinking before we got on the call, it's like, this is a perfect day for windowsill chats with a cup of tea. The sun is shining, which is rare in Britain. So you can imagine we're literally giddy with excitement and the seagulls are going nuts. Speaker 1 (3:22) I can't imagine that. Whenever Speaker 2 (3:24) we talk, it's always me plugging you for info about licensing. I regard you as our licensed whisperer now. Oh, thank you. I'll take it. That's your official title in the UK because it's for illustrators. Obviously, licensing is a really interesting area to get into, but it's so mysterious. And I know we talk about it in greater depth in the course piece you've recorded us. But I thought it'd be really good to talk about licensing for illustrators who haven't heard of it or have heard, but have no idea how to go about it. It's quite a... do they call it a nascent industry in the UK? Because it used to be the area of textile designers and pattern and surface. Speaker 1 (4:08) And it's broader than that, I think, now. And I would love to help enlighten. I continue to be enlightened every day about it myself. But yes, I have had my hands in it for a long, long time. Speaker 2 (4:24) You've been both ends or both sides of the business, haven't you? Because now you run Tantau Studio, which is a gorgeous studio collection of illustrators who are mostly licensing illustrators plus with other strings to their bow. Is that a fair description? Speaker 1 (4:41) It is, yes. Speaker 2 (4:43) And then you've also been a product developer, a buyer. What else have you been on the other side of the industry? Tell us a bit about it. Speaker 1 (4:51) I think I bring a good broad. range of experience to it because I've been an artist myself with work that somebody else. So I've been paid a licensing fee. I've licensed my work myself. I've worked, I've had a retail store. So I've bought product that was licensed. I've done, I've made, I've done product development for companies for a long, long time. So I've worked with. multiple licensing agencies and artists to license their work. I've worked on the side of the company itself. So I've managed, I've been in the company saying, oh, we'd like to license Tanya's work. I wish I had, I hadn't licensed your work yet. But just as an example, how can we go about that, develop product from it? So I've worked with artists, with agencies, been one myself. bought the product, developed the product, and now I have the agency. Speaker 2 (5:46) Oh, my Speaker 1 (5:47) God. Speaker 2 (5:47) So kind Speaker 1 (5:47) of everything you could do. And I haven't, thank goodness, owned a factory, but I've been to many. Speaker 2 (5:54) That's all that's left to do for your career. Oh, no, no. Or in licensing. Speaker 1 (5:59) I feel finally having the agency because I thought about it for so many years, but I was busy doing all those other things. I can do this now until the end of days. So I'm... I'm so glad it all worked and we'll probably get into this, but I happened into the agency in a really lovely way. So yeah, Speaker 2 (6:17) maybe we could, why don't you mention, just talk briefly about that? Cause we love Lilla as well. Make Art That Sells is such a great school. We, there's a lot of crossover in our listeners. When we spoke to them in Bologna, lots of people have done Make Art That Sells as well. They compliment each other really well. Speaker 1 (6:32) They really do. I love the both so much and I'm so glad they both exist. Back in the day when I was working with agents a lot and I was doing product development, when I would go to Certex, which was the licensing fair that is no longer RIP in the States, I would go first to Lilla's booth and look at her artists because they were always people that I felt were fresh and interesting and vibrant and unique. And I would say one year, I think we... I was visiting her at her house. I remember we were sitting in the living room and I was saying, your blurb books, everything she would show all the artists, art would be on the wall and there would be some artists there and they had this stack of blurb books and they were always so juicy. But I said, you know, all the art is flat. It's all flat. I would love it if your artists would think more about how to represent their work dimensionally. She said, What do you mean by that? And we talked about it a little bit. And she said, wouldn't that take away the art directors, not their job, but wouldn't that kind of step on their toes? And I was, au contraire. The art directors would love it because you would make their job easier. So at one point along the way, back in 2013 or 14, I submitted an idea to Beth Kempton, who's, who. is works with Lilla on Make Art That Sells for a course about that. And she said, they called me and said, could you do this with Lilla? So starting in 2015, we had a course how it was, I think we titled it how to creating collections for home decor. And it was all about how to think off the page, how to think about product. And it was different substrates and things like that. Anyway, so for a long time, Lilla has been a dear friend. And two years ago, July, I got two texts in the morning from two different people saying, did Lilla just announced she's closing the agency? And that was something I never imagined in my, I just never imagined something like that going away. In our lives now that we're older, there's been business like, you know, if Marks and Spencer went away, like you just, it's just not a thing. I called her. I literally picked up the phone, which we never do anymore. I called her and I said, are you okay? And, um, She just said she explained a couple of things and just she's leaning into the teaching and her. She had two lovely, lovely agents that that she had had for a long time and one was ready to retire, Susan. And then the other she and Lilla were going to run the agency together. And Kim decided she was going to go on and she's a creative artist as well and lean more into that. So Lilla had just thought there's nobody else to take it over. And then pause, pause. Do you want it? She said. And I said, yes, I do. So there's quite a gap between that phone call and then figuring out how that all worked legally, financially, actually, all that. But the net of it is my beautiful friend, Lilla, passed along some of the inner workings, her list, her things like that, her blessing, let's say, for me to that I couldn't say. No, like I knew the universe was screaming at me. Now's the time, in other words. So that's the long story. Speaker 2 (9:53) It just seems perfect. It seems such a natural Passover to you. And you seem like the perfect inheritor of it. So it's really nice that we've got all these different areas in our podcast, Lilla and you and Good Ship all together. And it's lovely to see how artist management develops. Speaker 1 (10:12) It is. And I certainly... It's not a cookie cutter of what Lilla did. And because I bring my experience to it and she had her experience to it, but it was just a huge. I felt like all the years that I was working in product, I had been developing my artists' relationships and not necessarily my... I had a wholesale showroom and I sold products, but there was a gap in between that. And it wasn't like I was selling to book publishers and things like that. So I had not been making those relationships. strong for myself. So that was a concern for me just starting cold. And it's licensing. And I know we're going to touch on this. It's a runway. It's quite a long runway because it's the relationships that are the gold there. So you can look on LinkedIn and everywhere and find out who to send your work to, but it's getting your foot in the door. having them see your work and establishing that relationship that then they know how you work, what type of work you produce, that you're good for it, and they come back to you. And that just takes a minute. It takes a minute, but then you have it and you have it forever. Speaker 2 (11:32) Yeah, I think relationships are so valuable because there's a lot of trust involved in licensing. If you haven't been in it before, it seems scary. Like, how do I know that they're going to pay me the percentage they promised to pay for the volume of work that's produced or sold? What if someone fiddles the numbers? What if they copy my files or they put it on really poor materials or sell it in cheap shops? Which kind of is a good point probably for us to at this point say, maybe for people who haven't experienced licensing. from an illustrator's point of view, could you give us some insight into what licensing involves, what it is actually? Speaker 1 (12:07) Yes, it is. It's interesting because it's really a range of things. So to boil it way down, licensing is when you align, you partner with a company that And a company might be small. It might be one or two people. It might be large. It might be hundreds of people. But what they want is your art and your creativity to make their product stand out. So that might be a label for spices. That might be a postcard to sell in their heritage shop.