We recently learnt of a new entrant to the brand licensing distribution chain. As the industry continues to assess the meandering shift of the bricks & mortar retail platform, it is clear that the way we consume is definitely going to be very different into the future. With change comes opportunity and Nathan Mazri and Pascal Haider have assessed the current situation and identified an opportunity to offer a smart technology based solution for organizations to sell seamlessly to fans all over the globe.
Egeez is a perfect disruptor at a time where companies who deal in brands are searching for a better way to showcase and sell their products and services. It’s a simple equation — sell anywhere, find your local fans, your e-commerce suite and effectively sell your overstocks. As this announcement was being made we were able to catch-up with Nathen Mazri in Dubai, where he is currently on-boarding retailers and licensees to his new platform. We asked him about Egeez and how it will change the business.
Nathen, what was the initial inspiration for Egeez and why?
Fat thanks to #Garfield for leading me to innovate a disruptive marketplace and raise seed capital not just to help the fat orange cat, but to help cartoons/IPs worldwide disrupting the licensing industry during #COVID19… who said there were no opportunities in difficulties? @egeezapp was founded during the lockdown in #Toronto, the new tech hub competing with Silicon Valley. I realized I had to embrace the digital era while everyone is at home! Eating and working remotely bringing death to QSRR era — (quick service restaurant and retail) as well as brick and mortars including @garfieldeatsapp my fast food restaurants, even though we survived for its popularity and fast gourmet food… it woke me up to shift. As an official Nickelodeon licensee, I understood the pain of global licensees trying to sell their merchandise and pay royalties to Walt Disney, Nickelodeon or other licensors. Licensees suffer from overstock and selling so I decided to help reduce their storage fees and connect them to billions of fans. #thinkbig
So your portal becomes the engine room to sell and the retailer or licensee simply ships the goods anywhere in the world. Is that correct?
Yes. Licensors/Licensees listed on the Egeez platform will only have to ship products — we take care of everything else. It’s super simple and they can get onboarded today. Egeez becomes the Amazon and UberEATS for entertainment brands. We onboard vendors and curate the licensed products internally at Egeez by our Happiness Account Managers in every continent and no business in 2020 does not have an ecommerce solution or shipping partner to ship. They simply receive an automated order confirmation or snooze or sms or email notification and they ship directly. Egeez can integrate with their ecommerce solutions such as shopify, woocommerce, magento and much more for seamless fulfillment.
Infringement on IP is a big deal in our business, there have been questions as to whether Amazon and Alibaba properly control officially licensed merchandise. Have you solved this problem with E Geez?
We only sell official licensed products verified by our team. Every licensee or vendor must provide their licensing agreement or letter of confirmation provided usually by licensor (such as Nickelodeon in my case for GarfieldEATS) to upload in Egeez client portal as part of the requirements. From the backend, all stakeholders (vendor, staff, developers) can see the blue tick which means they satisfied their requirements and ready to publish their products for end users. We can 100% guarantee a product belongs to the actual licensor before we publish products on our marketplace. If not, get 100% of your money back.
Can you explain your geolocation function to our readers?
To connect billions of fans with global entertainment brands, we need geolocation at the forefront of our technology stack. We have developed a geolocation feature within our mobile app and web marketplace — that enables great benefits for our vendors and customers. Our geolocation feature allows vendors to sell globally or to specific, targeted regions of the world. Our vendors can manage where they sell — with just a simple click. More importantly, our customers are all geolocated from the moment they interact with Egeez. This ensures they receive the best content, products and marketing materials, tailored to their city, country, or region. This feature also empowers our vendors to track and engage with their customers on a deeper level. Our customers are able to search for products in their area, and our vendors are able to sell specific products to our customers per region. Our geolocation feature — geographically locates our customers, depending on which device or system they are using by routing addresses or internal GPS of those devices to determines their location.
We only sell official licensed products verified by our team.
Nathen Mazri
So Nathen, you mention artificial intelligence as one of your features. How does this feature work?
Alexa is used and listened to by millions of customers around the world — as artificial intelligence is increasingly integral to our daily lives. At Egeez, we believe our fans should be able to interact with their favourite cartoon or entertainment icon with their voice. We are developing our mobile app and web marketplace to be fully immersive with Alexa, with plans to develop this voice recognition technology with Google and Siri. Our customers can browse our products with their voice — and each time they do, we have integrated Machine Learning software programmed to learn, adapt, evolve and grow with our customers and their journey with Egeez. We’re enabling our customers to search cartoons, studios, and even movies, directly in our app with their voice. We wanted to bring this data and reporting analytics directly to our vendors, so they can gain useful insights into the decisions of their customers. We’re currently giving birth to the name of our voice assistant, we will keep you updated on this exciting news.
Customer retention is key, what tools does Egeez use to deliver this service to its clients?
Access your egeez reports, sales, orders, and more to make enhanced decision making with your licensor, marketing team, & manufacturer as you learn on the go about your licensed products. Egeez also becomes their marketing partner to design social media posts and create engagement throughout their contract period. Egeez is also partnering with Clevertap technology, omnichannel customer engagement and user retention platform that dramatically improves customer lifetime value.
Along with a global marketplace comes responsibility. How does your management & reporting to your customers work?
Egeez’s have Happiness Account Managers in every continent today onboarding official licensed products around the clock from North America to India, Europe, Asia and Middle East. Licensees can Control their own licensed products wherever, whenever. Our dashboard provides vendors with advanced reporting tools, including full orders and offers access to statistics on your fans and reporting tools to impress their licensor.
I really like the dedicated aspect of your platform. How do you think the industry will embrace Egeez?
It is amazingly surprising how a good idea becomes clear and obvious. We now know we are on to something big and disruptive to the licensing industry. When licensing International says in 25 years, we have not seen something like this and holding conference calls with major Hollywood studios including Penguin Random House to onboard all their licensed books is incredible and we barely launched. Our target is to onboard over 100,000 retailers and licensees globally. We are in discussion with Smurfs, WWE, Purple Turtle, M&M by Mars, Warner Bros Canada, Garfield licensees and much more as well as licensing agents such as IMG representing Dolly Parton, Gene Simmons, Fortnite, Lamborghini and others. It is fascinating to be able to be sought after to help in this uncertain world.
We only sell official licensed products verified by our team.
Nathen Mazri
I like your product-matching feature to a fan base. What’s an example?
As a fan, you can easily filter by cartoon, studio, movie and other filtering options to receive a wide arrange of curated selections as per your needs. You can also tell Egeez voice assistant what cartoon you love in order to find your favorite cartoons products. For example: filter by Garfield, and Egeez will curate Garfield products from food to apparel to toys, geo-located by various licensees in respect to their authorized selling territory. So if a licensee for Garfield in Toronto does stock Garfield merch but the fan is in Montreal and licensee has no authorization to sell to Montreal fans, then the Garfield products will not show from the end user’s perspective as part of the fan’s search list in Montreal to protect the licensor/licensee agreement and develop trust in the licensing industry as the official dedicated marketplace.
Can you provide some quick insight into how your marketplace will manage the shipping of food products?
As I do come from the fast food and restaurant industry, I thought it was important given everyone is now doing their groceries more than ever during this pandemic supporting the food manufacturer and licensees in the food industry as it can be challenging fighting for one shelf in Sobeys against Kraft as they work hard to pay their MGs and royalties. Egeez curates licensed food products such as GarfieldEATS big cow lasagna if you are in Toronto for delivery or pickup or Eggo waffles shaped in 3 Paw Petrol characters found at Loblaws or Wal Mart. We onboard grocery stores with an ecommerce and delivery solution and sell their licensed food products only within their licensed territory. Hello Kitty Café in Los Angeles can also become a partner with Egeez, for example if they do delivery. We are also looking into integrating with third party food delivery platforms such as UberEATS or SkipTheDishes to make it easier for restaurants who don’t have delivery drivers to onboard on Egeez.
This article was originally featured in our October 2020 magazine
