Sell to Disney Store and Become a Disney Store Supplier

Learn everything you need to know to become a Disney store supplier

Hey, everyone, this is Karen Waksman, founder of Retail MBA. Today I’m going to talk about the Disney Store and becoming a Disney Store Supplier. Now the reason I decided to create this particular training is because people always ask me about the Disney Store, how do I get products in there and so forth. So Disney is kind of a unique thing in that obviously they have Disney’s products all over, all sorts of different things, and so you definitely need to learn about licensing and putting licensed images of Disney and stuff on your products a lot of the time, ’cause clearly that’s important to Disney, right?

What you can sell to Disney stores

So that’s one topic and so forth, but today I want to talk about an example of something that worked for somebody that I know. So they had playing cards that they created, actually, like literally playing cards, and what they did was they converted these cards and they put stuff like Alice in Wonderland on these cards and so forth, so they got the license to be able to put that on these playing cards. So they created these really cool cards and so they licensed these imagery from, you know, Disney and so forth, and then they put them on the cards and they’ve been selling these cards, right?

There is some finessing that you have to do when you sell to Disney stores

My point in sharing that with you is that it’s a smaller company and so, you know, they’d been selling to local stores and so forth, and sometimes I like to share stories ’cause it helps people think through what to do. So with them, I live in San Francisco, and, with them, they actually went to their local Disney store in San Francisco. They have a popular one here. So they actually went to the store manager and they let the store manager know that they had this, you know, cool new product, playing card product, and they kept in touch with that store manager. Eventually they actually got their product in a Disney Store, in one store, and actually got moving that direction.

How to get your products into Disney stores

Now they didn’t buy right away. It has to match up to certain themes that they’re doing. The movie was coming out, so in their case it made sense that they were gonna do a whole section. The buyer remembered them and so they put their product in stores and so forth. So something to consider is you can actually sell to Disney kind of on a local or regional level as well, so that’s kind of fun. So you can put it in one store and say that you got your product into Disney and so forth.

Things that you need to know before reaching out to sell to Disney stores

Now I will tell you that he learned what buyers are looking for and how to express himself with his product and so forth through training and education. So, if you want to learn what to actually say to Disney and so forth, you don’t want to just show up. You want to learn a little bit more. You know, obviously you know now that they can buy on a local level, but I’d like to support you a little further. You know, please take a look at my website, RetailMBA.com. I actually have a free training series you can just opt into with your email address. I talk about how to actually reach out to retailers appropriately and so forth, ’cause there is some finessing and learning about retail before you just go after them, ’cause it makes the difference between you getting an order or not.