Hello everyone

   I am trying to figure out how to get the licensing rights to put Nintendo images and the name on t-shirts and other clothing items. I am trying to start a retro throw back clothing store but would love to get the licensing and right to create and have Nintendo images and the Nintendo name on some shirts. As a graphic designer, I am pretty creative and have some great ideas I would like to come up with for some clothing graphics but can’t seem to find a way to get in touch with Nintendo. If anyone knows a way or knows someone who works for NOA who can get me in touch with someone about the right and privlages of creating Nintendo logos and graphics please let me know. This also goes for Sega and Atari too! Thanks.

First place to start would be asking Nintendo.

https://www.nintendo.com/corp/lic...

Contact their legal team at 800.255.3700 or at: [email protected].

Interesting stuff. I looked at the list of license holders, which includes Shurtech Brands, which was under the "Duct Tape" header. Does Shurtech make Nintendo-branded duct tape? So I googled it and... yep!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amaz...

Hot Topic already does that and I can only imagine what they had to pay just to get the licensing rights to do that.

Oh, wow.  They are head quartered about 10 miles from where I live, and I even considered looking for work for them when I was looking for software engineering work locally.  (Everybody love duck tape!) I actually knew their chief accountant for a time.  I bet he knows how much licensing was, but I doubt I could ever get those details from him.  We weren't friends, but knew each other well enough through service work.

Anyway, what I'd love to see is classic mario branded stuff that has the look mario had from the SMB1-2 days.  IMHO, it wasn't until SMB3 that Mario and the crew solidified there look that hasn't changed much over the years.  Anything before then was a bit less restrictive on the artist creating the material, but there are still definite versions of mario specific to Donkey Kong, SMB1 or SMB2 and love all of them.  The same could be said for Link and Zelda.
 

Just @nintendo on twitter! I think that's what people do these days, lol!

Yeah, I imagine getting a license from Nintendo would cost an exorbitant amount of money. I would also expect them to dictate all the terms and micromanage every aspect.

Atari might be hungry enough to go for it, though.

Atari is easy enough.
[email protected]

This might be Sega's.
https://sega-license.com/en/inqui...


 

I will say with a bit of time, this might get easier and easier. Companies still protect their brands, but I've noticed in the last 10 years ago, mostly started with Disney, big corps realized "Well, we have these franchises that people love. If we lower our licensing fees, we can have other people churn out our brands on everything under the sun, and still make money, plus it's perpetual marketing."

This is why you can now find just about any product you can think of with some STAR WARS motif on it. In 2005, that would be almost unthinkable. Of course, Lucas was more than willing to do that but as of recently, this trend has really skyrocketed. All it will take is for Nintendo to realize that and they might slack off a bit on their licensing so long as people are willing to pay for each item produced.

Just sell them online like everyone else does.

There's thousands of shirts with their characters in different online stores.

ha, that's what I was gonna say. Just slap Nintendo stuff on whatever you want and sell it online... everyone else seems to get away with it pretty easily.