***The Born team attending Licensing Expo in 2025.***

Every year, the licensing industry converges on Las Vegas for one week. Deals are made. Partnerships are forged. Careers are shaped. And for anyone who has ever stood on that show floor for the first time, there is nothing quite like it.

I have been attending Licensing Expo since 2013 - first as part of the Warner Bros. Consumer Products team, now as the founder of Born Licensing, with a team of 13 and our own booth for the first time. The show has changed over the years. My relationship to it has changed even more.

This is what Licensing Expo actually is - and why it matters more than people outside our industry ever fully understand.

What It Looks Like From the Outside

My first Licensing Expo arrived with the kind of anticipation you only feel for things you have spent years imagining. I had heard about it throughout my early career. I had wanted to go. And then, finally, I was there - walking onto a show floor unlike any B2B event I had ever seen.

It does not look like a trade show. It looks like a consumer event that somehow got 12,000+ industry professionals to attend. Enormous full-colour booths. Every major character property you have ever loved represented at scale. Funko Pops taller than a grown adult. A life-sized game of Connect Four outside the Hasbro stand. The actual Batman and Pennywise costumes from the films on display in the middle of a convention centre in Las Vegas.

And then there are the characters themselves. Over the years I have had my photo taken with close to 100 of them. Elmo, Shrek, Barney, the Teletubbies, Bluey, Peppa Pig, Cookie Monster, SpongeBob. I do not plan on stopping any time soon.

“It is, without question, the most fun trade show floor in the world. And then you realise - underneath all of it - this is where the business of our industry actually happens.”

What It Looks Like From the Inside

Licensing Expo draws over 12,000 registered professionals from more than 77 countries. Retailers, manufacturers, marketers, agents, licensors. Every major IP holder is represented: Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, Mattel, Hasbro, Universal, Netflix.

The meetings are fast and focused. Thirty-minute back-to-back slots, and the diaries of the most in-demand licensors fill up months in advance. When I was at Warner Bros., I had the luxury of sitting at a table while meetings came to me. These days, with my own agency, I am the one navigating the floor - sprinting from a Barbie meeting on the Mattel booth across the entire convention centre to the Peanuts stand on the other side. It is, genuinely, a bit of a workout!

Then there are the summits. Invite-only events hosted by the major licensors, where they pull back the curtain on what is coming in the next 24 months. The big films. The anniversaries. The franchises they are backing. Your phone goes into a pouch at the door. You sign an NDA before you enter. It is one of the most exciting rooms you can sit in as a licensing professional - because you are seeing the roadmap before almost anyone else does.

If you know how to use that information, it changes how you make licensing decisions for the next two years.

At what other business trade show would you run into The Teletubbies?!

The Awards. The Recognition. The Weight of It.

Monday evening of Licensing Expo week is traditionally the Licensing Excellence Awards - the Oscars of our industry. Born Licensing has been nominated every year since 2018. We have won in 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2024.

The 2018 win is the one I come back to most. The He-Man and Skeletor campaign - where the characters recreated the lift scene from Dirty Dancing for a MoneySupermarket campaign in the UK - was one of those licensing executions that made people stop and pay attention. I remember carrying that trophy into dinner afterwards with a level of pride I had not expected to feel quite so intensely.

Being nominated in an industry producing the quality of work ours does means something. Winning is extraordinary. And doing it consistently, as a relatively young agency, tells you something important: that the quality of the work and the integrity of the process is being recognised at the highest level.

Accepting Born Licensing’s first Licensing International Excellence Award in 2018

Thirteen Years Later: What Has Changed

In 2013, I was a spring chicken in my mid-twenties, wide-eyed on that floor for the first time. Thirteen years later, I am walking it with a team of 13 - several of whom will be experiencing it for the very first time, just like I was.

This year, Born Licensing will have our own booth. Booth T236. After 13 years of attending Licensing Expo, we are exhibiting for the first time - with our Born to License division. We will have licensed product at the booth made by our clients: Barbie backpacks, Disney drink bottles. It is a moment I have been building towards without fully realising it.

“I personally finish every Licensing Expo more motivated than I start it. That alone tells you what kind of event this is.”

WOLFpak’s Barbie backpack will be one of the products on display at the Born to License booth at Licensing Expo

Why I Bring the Whole Team

This is not about the spectacle. It is about accelerated learning, concentrated into one week.

The junior members of our team leave Licensing Expo with an understanding of this industry that would otherwise take years to develop. They see the scale of the IP world. They sit in meetings with some of the most significant brand owners on the planet. They understand, viscerally, what it means to operate in a global industry - and they come home different.

For the more experienced people in the team, it is a reminder. A recalibration. A week that strips away the noise of daily operations and reconnects you with why the work matters.

What we do is genuinely fun. We work with characters and IP every single day. We work alongside talented, passionate people doing creative and commercially meaningful things. Licensing Expo is the moment where we celebrate all of that together — on the biggest stage our industry has - in one of the most talked-about cities in the world.

The Born team at the Born Summit 2026 in LA prior to Licensing Expo 2026.

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The Bottom Line

Licensing Expo is not a conference. It is not a convention. It is not just a trade show.

It is the clearest expression of what this industry is: a global business built on the power of characters, brands, and stories to create commercial value at scale. Every major licensing relationship in the world is either started, accelerated, or reinforced within a few hundred metres of that show floor.

If you work in licensing and you have never been — go. If you have been before and stopped going — reconsider. The cost of attending is real. The cost of being absent from the room where your industry shapes itself is higher.

We will be at Booth T236. Come and find us.

want to connect?

The Born Perspective is one part of a bigger conversation. If you want more, you can find me on LinkedIn for industry commentary, Instagram for what's happening day to day, and YouTube and the Born to License Podcast for deeper dives into the world of licensing. Pick your platform. I'll be there.