BLE Renames Competition Category in Honor of Kelvyn Gardner

Brand Licensing Europe (BLE) has paid tribute to the late Kelvyn Gardner by renaming License This! to the Kelvyn Gardner License This! Competition.

For more than a decade, the competition has aimed to help brands and designers break into the licensing industry. Applications for this year’s entries close on October 11, with the competition final taking place in person at BLE on November 19.

In addition to renaming the competition, BLE has nominated day two of the festival (November 18) as Colour for Kelvyn day. Attendees are invited to wear bright colors in honor of Gardner’s love for eye-catching jackets and make a donation in his name to the industry charity The Light Fund.

In other BLE news, the event has added a third award category in partnership with Mojo Nation to provide a springboard for inventors and designers looking to break into the sector. Applicants for the product design category will be asked to submit a design for a desktop product—such as a mouse, coffee mug, desk tidy or USB stick—drawing inspiration from the Aardman IP Morph.

This year’s judging lineup has also been revealed, as well as the return of Start Licensing Director Ian Downes. In addition to Downes, the lineup includes Phil King, managing director at Trademark Products; Sabrina Segalov, senior international licensing manager at Sanrio Global Limited; Emily Aldridge, head of global licensing at Abysse Corp; Dan Grant, licensing director at Danilo; Teri Niadna, managing director at Brandgenuity; Sarah Ward, chief executive at The Giftware Association; Clare Piggott, managing director at Larkshead Media; Billy Langsworthy, co-founder of Mojo Nation and Brands Untapped; Rob Goodchild, commercial director at Aardman; Sarah Lawrence director of This is Iris; Jehane Boden Spiers, founder at JEHANE; Karen Hewitt, buying director at Character.com; Maxine Lister, head of licensing at the Natural History Museum; and Dale Boreham, senior design manager at Moonpig.

Anna Knight, VP of licensing at Informa Markets, said: “Kelvyn was someone that I—and everyone else in the licensing industry—genuinely loved and truly admired. He chaired License This! from day one and was a massive advocate for making the sector accessible to everyone, particularly new blood with exciting ideas. He was so generous with his time—not only through the judging process—but also with the mentoring he offered the finalists and winners, that it seems only fitting it’s now known as the Kelvyn Gardner License This! Competition.”

Knight added: “Colour for Kelvyn day is obviously inspired by his love of a colorful jacket, which seemed to get more outrageous every year, and also by his advocacy of and support for The Light Fund; it’s a really special charity that Kelvyn was always keen to help. We also want to say a huge thank you to Kelvyn’s wife and children—Michelle, Regan and Eliot—for enabling us to honor him in this manner and for joining us at BLE this year to launch Colour for Kelvyn day at 9 a.m. on Thursday, November 17. I can’t wait to see the hall filled with a rainbow of colors in his memory.”