What A Morning

Musings from Dennis #74: It was a morning like this. I sat there, upright in my bed one Saturday morning in the December of 2000 totally despondent. What was I to do. The day before, our Disney mall event retail operator, a renowned department store called me to say they felt cheated by their landlord the mall owner. Apparently between them there was a misunderstanding on securing a credit card company as a sponsor for the event. And they both got one each. But the mall’s sponsor gave way more money so they nullified the store’s regular partner, much to the store’s chagrin. In those days if you don’t have a merchandise area (and this was a 100-feet long stretch across the entire mall’s ground floor spine) you don’t have an event. And they wanted to now pull out, never mind the event was 7 days away and they made all the arrangements with our licensees already. So after breakfast, again I sat in the living room for an hour and suddenly an idea came to me. I called my boss (sorry it’s a Saturday I know), got his okay and then I called the retailer. I made them “an offer they could not refuse” (thanks to The Godfather for this quote) and the event went on. Essentially and a very unusual move that I have never repeated since: I proposed that we the licensor become the retail operator but we hired this store to do the work for us. No business risk or loss, just share a small percentage of sales. We took care of all operating costs and they could still use their store carrier bags and have their signage onsite, so it appears that they are the ones who are running the show. It worked and the show went on. One of the several heart-stopping situations I had to go through in my career life!