Licensing's golden child

Sales of the Harry Potter bedding from Springs Inds. Have seen an uptick since the movie hype began.

Vasso Unks, marketing director for P.J. Kids, the company holding the license for Harry Potter furniture, said the loft beds sold out and a new shipment is moving quickly.

“Many retailers indicated they should have bought in earlier and not waited to see if the collection was going to do well,” she said, adding that the company has new products ready for consideration by the mass market rather than the upper-end and specialty market.

Unks said expectations are running high that the hoopla will continue into 2011 with the release of the movie’s video in the summer followed by the second movie. Warner Bros. has announced that the second movie, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” will be released Nov. 15. Filming of the follow-up has already begun.

“Everyone is clamoring for book five, and we do not yet have a date on that yet,” Unks said.

Springs Inds. holds the bedding license, and Ted Matthews, vice president, said the company saw a “pretty dramatic uptick in demand about a week or so prior to the movie opening thanks to the trailers and the popular press writing about the movie.

This prized trunk, based on Harry’s very own, is part of the Golden Desk collection by P.J. Kids and is selling well.

“All of that generated a lot of interest and caused the bedding to fly off the shelves,” he said, adding that Springs has expanded distribution to include mass merchants like Wal-Mart and Kmart.

Online sales have proven that Harry also is a sales wiz. According to a survey conducted by comScore Networks, online sales of Harry Potter-related tickets, books, toys and other goods for the week ended Nov. 25 totaled about $7 million.

With corporate and other sales left to be counted, comScore estimated that as much as $3 million worth of movie tickets were sold online, while $2.5 million in books and as much as $2 million worth of Harry products were sold.

ComScore gathers its data by monitoring the online browsing and buying activity of 1.5 million Internet users who have agreed to allow their behavior to be observed.