Sandylion sold to Trends International
It was announced Monday that Markham, Ontario-based Sandylion Sticker Designs has been sold to Trends International, a Mississauga, Ontario-based firm that specializes in licensed consumer products.
Both companies have been active in the licensed products market, and some of their licenses actually overlap, such as Canadian Olympic Team and the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Spiderman, The Last Airbender (an upcoming movie), Disney, and Urban Vocab (a graffiti artist).
Sandylion Sticker Designs was founded in 1982. Their packaged stickers (marketed recently as the "Essentials" line) were an industry staple at the start of the scrapbook boom ten to twelve years ago. They later introduced full scrapbooking collections but in recent product cycles had greatly thinned their offerings to focus mostly on their licensed lines featuring characters from companies like Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, and Disney.
The company had shown signs of distress for some time. At CHA Summer 2009, Sandylion was using what it called an eco-friendly booth that seemed also a likely economizing move, given its simplicity and extremely light weight. One of its key product promotions at that show was also a 3D line of papers in conjunction with the Toy Story 3 movie - an odd choice seeing as how the movie didn't come out until Summer 2010. The company had also switched from offering open-stock paper lines to selling paper in pads, limiting their number of SKUs.
Trends International was founded in 1987 and according to a recent press release has products in 10,000 retail locations. The company has offices in Mississauga, Ontario and Indianapolis, IN. It produces a wide variety of licensed consumer products, including posters, stickers, calendars, coloring kits and stationery. In additional to traditional printed items, Trends International also produces some licensed 3D effect printed items, such as calendars and posters. Major licenses that they hold include Disney, Marvel, Nickelodeon, MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL. Their home page currently features a banner promoting their licensed products for the upcoming Toy Story 3 movie.
In April, Trends International announced the launch of a brand called Sticker Xpress, which it described as "a brand-new comprehensive lineup of Sticker and Sticker Activity products."
A rep for Trends International told Scrapbook Update that Trends will continue to market products under the Sandylion brand name, and that the company will "continue to develop new licensed SKU’s for the scrapbook market."
Although both companies have exhibited at CHA in the past, neither company is listed as an exhibitor for the upcoming CHA Summer 2010 show in Chicago.
