Late last year Bioworld Merchandising, which licenses and sells a myriad of pop culture-branded clothing and products like Mario baseball caps and “Stranger Things” socks, launched an investment arm designed to bolster smaller companies with the potential to be “challenger brands.”
Bioworld Ventures, according to the company, is “a new corporate venture fund designed to support and accelerate high-potential consumer brands around the world.” The idea is to let smaller companies tap into the distribution system and infrastructure its built out for its own products, potentially giving them a shot in the arm.
It also marks a new chapter for the company timed to its 25th anniversary.
“Bioworld Ventures represents the evolution of our global brand – providing the opportunity for us to further extend our expertise to elevate and invest in consumer brands that are focused on product innovation,” said Raj Malik, CEO and founder of Bioworld, in a statement.
The Wrap spoke to Matt Alexander, who oversees Bioworld’s investments and M&A as VP of Corporate Development and head of Bioworld Ventures, about the new direction and what Bioworld is, exactly, given that it has the kind of anonymous name that could be selling ice cream or resurrecting a woolly mammoth from extinction.
Can you talk a little bit about what Bioworld Merchandising is and how Bioworld Ventures was created?
Bioworld is a funny beast. It’s been around for 25 years. It’s quite sizable, probably approaching 1,000 employees globally, with offices all over the place, and it’s extremely well known in the licensing space, but not so much outside of it.
The company got started in 1999 started by a guy called Raj Malik. He started out with, of all things, developing hats for bands like Limp Bizkit and has slowly pursued a plan where they’ve often bought other companies and expanded into a lot of different categories, product types, things of that nature over the years. They’re headquartered in the Dallas area and really well known for its work in the entertainment IP space – developing merchandise, licensed products, things of that nature.
In recent years, they started to really diversify beyond that. They’ve developed a handful of their own direct-to-consumer brands and bought a few. There’s been a push into more mainstream brands, so we now do a lot globally with brands like New Balance, for example. And the company, honestly is hard to pin down. It’s a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the core heritage of the business is in the licensing space.
My job is to come in and help diversify the business and build beyond that. I joined in 2024. I’ve known Raj for a long time, and he’s been looking to leverage more of the infrastructure that’s been built that fuels the business today to support other businesses, whether that’s startups that need better infrastructure, sourcing, logistics, things of that nature, or it might be pursuing additional acquisitions, as they’ve done historically, to help us get into new categories, new areas of business, new countries. I run all of our mergers and acquisitions and then we’ve given formal shape to our venture investing as a corporate venture fund. We’ve just launched that, called Bioworld Ventures and that’s where I sit.
What are you looking for in terms of Bioworld Ventures, if you’re looking to expand this brand and to acquire new things? And how do you go from primarily licensed products to something bigger?
As it relates to me and going forward, I think it’s just about how we take that spirit and formalize it into more of a strategy where we can go and pursue all sorts of different areas of business with very much an open mind. The venture side of things is very opportunistic and driven very much from an almost educational philosophy. And of course, you want to make good economic and financial decisions. But for us as more of a quote, unquote, strategic investor, the thinking often plays into, okay, well, this would be really interesting to learn more about this a little bit closer. This might be a category we’re interested in. It might be a region. It might be a product type, since Bioworld is active in most major categories, except footwear or beauty.
The venture side of things, if we can make investments in brands and concepts that we believe in that are growing quickly, first of all, we can help them, if they want to use logistics or our supply chain or otherwise, those aren’t available outside the company, but we’re more than happy to extend them to companies we invest in and so that can help them have much better margin structures and a better chance of success. In exchange for us, we get to learn a lot more and be exposed to an area that we might want to go into later. Then from an M&A perspective, it’s a similar philosophy, but more grounded in okay, what can we do to grow this thing? And so it’s all very much from the perspective of okay, how can we help this go 2o, 30, 40 times bigger than where it is when we buy it.
A lot of the world in and around M&A, there’s a lot of private equity and otherwise, and that’s very much about modest gains, keeping costs very controlled, and then eventually selling it later. By virtue of the fact that we don’t have investors or otherwise, our position is more benevolent and open-minded, where we’re coming to it from the perspective of, how can we grow this? How can we be helpful? But also, how can we get out of the way where Bioworld is at its best as a really, really powerful and robust consumer engine, not so much a marketing powerhouse. Right up to the consumer. It’s not a name that everyone knows, but if we can sit behind the scenes and power names that are well known, we can give them a real competitive advantage. That plays into all sorts of different areas for us.
We can look at it and say, Okay, well, there’s an interesting opportunity in the UK. For example, we bought a company last year called Character World that opened the door for us to have pick up a lot of global licenses in the sport space, okay, but it also allows for us to have a little bit more infrastructure in the UK. We already have a joint venture here, and we can double down and really build on that to expand more of what we’re doing in the UK. It also, by virtue of their business model, got us more into the home category and more into home textiles and sleep. Now we can look at a little bit more in the way of investments, acquisitions in and around, sleepwear, kids, things of that nature.
It’s hard to synthesize into a really short answer, unfortunately, but the moral of the story is that, with a lot of these strategic groups, there’s a very prescriptive model as to how you would do these things with Bioworld, coming back to where I started, it’s much more entrepreneurial, it’s much more open. It’s looking at things not from the perspective of, no, we don’t do that as a policy. It’s looking at it more from an open-minded angle of, What could we do with this? Could we play here? For someone in my role, it’s a lot of fun. You get to look at a lot of different things and of course, say “no” more than you say “yes,” but it’s from a position that’s fairly unique in the market.
What groups or organizations are appealing to you now?
Without getting into all the specifics, I’m in the process of closing four acquisitions at the moment in four different countries, three of which play in and around the licensing space, one of which is more of a consumer brand that we can build upon in the United States.
I think how we look at those varies from one to the next. In the case of Character World, what was exciting about it was that it’s not a core area of expertise for Bioworld. They also had a lot of strategic exclusive licenses and partnerships, both in the UK, but globally as well, and a really strong team. In our case, Bioworld has always been very active, from an M&A perspective, and has bought all sorts of different companies. Historically, most of those have been folded into Bioworld. Today, if we can sustain their autonomy and allow them to feed off Bioworld as its as a core, it means that they retain their identity and what makes them competitive and interesting, but also means that they can have much more efficient margin structure.
At the end of the day, a lot of it comes down to a balance of art and science. Of course, you’re looking at their financials. You’re looking at everything that you would expect. But you want that really good team. You want those people that are really hungry. You want people that, if they’re selling a brand, they still have the hunger for and they want to stay and build upon it and to have that excitement and do it with potentially much bigger infrastructure attached to them to help them do it. But it comes from a position of, above all else, curiosity, certainly on the venture side of things, where Bioworld knows what it knows, and it does it very well in that licensing space. But we see hundreds of opportunities at any given time. And we’re looking at those trying to see, okay, well, what’s going to be most interesting? What might unlock something culturally within Bioworld that might be really exciting and interesting? It might be a tool. It might be something in the AI space, it might be something that plays into how we manage licenses. It might play into all new brands or a new category that we’re not in yet, but we may want to push more into and so there’s no specific criteria. We’re not coming at it and saying, you have to be in a certain revenue range. It has to be this check size. It’s much looser than that. But either the north star of all of it is generally in the consumer space with a great team, U.S., UK, Canada, generally, and, and if we think the arithmetic is, one plus one equals three.
You brought up AI. How much is technology driving these acquisitions and what are you thinking about in terms of AI and its role in licensing and consumer products?
I would say it’s probably similar to everything else I’ve shared where you’d be irresponsible not to be looking at it and thinking about it and what we can use it for to help. But it’s also something that you have to take very cautiously. As a licensing business, you have to get approval for a lot of your designs to make sure everything you’re doing is totally unique and goes through proper approval processes and otherwise. You can’t just generate a whole bunch of things and hope for the best. It doesn’t quite work that way. We’re not going to override the creative process within Bioworld. We still want designers and that creative spirit.
But I think Bioworld has always been technology-forward business investing, data and analysis, and so there’s been a big step in recent years, predating me, to really pay a lot of attention to all sorts of market analysis and data that we can capture, both from our business but also from the broader marketplace. There’s a huge amount of data-driven decision-making that’s made, whether it’s trying to identify a property before it’s really popped, and we can get there early, or a musician or a brand, whatever it is, in my world, it’s similar. I would say that most of what we do is still very relationally driven.
We announced Bioworld Ventures. And naturally, what comes with that is a lot of people that hadn’t considered Bioworld as a potential investor or partner before, now it opens their mind to it, and we get a huge amount of interesting ideas and prospects that come to us. For me, having been in that world, there’s a personal level there where you look for the right founders, the right partners, the right people, and how they’re thinking about the businesses.
I don’t think there’s much there that AI can obviate or replace, but I think the efficiencies in terms of how we do things back-of-house, how we manage these things, how we can make things flow as quickly as possible, that, of course, is, I think, where it can play for us, just like any other company. But all of the decision-making still, is very much a human endeavor. I think where AI will be for us is certainly what we’ll be doing more from a back-of-house perspective, and what we can do to run the business, and then from my side of things, that’s opportunistic, if we come across really interesting ideas in the marketplace that we think are interesting, they might have nothing to do with Bioworld, we’ll certainly look at those and see if there’s opportunity for us to participate and learn more.
