MERCHANDISING: The Mighty Mouse

In Burbank, Calif, last week, Walt Disney was presented with the 5,000,000th watch to be manufactured with the name and likeness of Mickey Mouse. As he put it among his trophies, Disney smiled at a beaming, moon-faced Manhattan salesman named Kay Kamen.

Disney and Kamen had just signed a seven-year renewal of a 16-year business association. As the salesman of exclusive manufacturing rights for Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters, Kamen has not only planted their likenesses on children’s watches, but on 2,000 other products, ranging from meat, breakfast foods and fruit juices to weather vanes, candy, cameras, toys, sweaters, ice cream packages and wallpaper. This year goods bearing the faces of Disney characters will bring in a retail gross of $100 million.

Black Lamb. Kamen, who defines his sales territory as reaching “from the Isthmus of Panama to Hudson Bay” (after Jan. 1 Disney’s brother, Roy, will handle the rest of the world), considers himself the world’s greatest Disney fan. Whenever a new picture is completed, he flies to Hollywood to preview it, begins selling its characters before the film is even released. Last week he had just seen Disney’s latest, So Dear to My Heart, was already lining up contracts to reproduce its animal hero Danny, a little black lamb.

Disney and Kamen both started their early careers in Kansas City. There, in the early ’20s, Disney was struggling along as a commercial artist, Kamen as a sales promotion man for department stores.

In 1932, when Mickey Mouse had already made Disney famous, Kamen went out to Hollywood, sold him the idea of letting him handle the manufacturing royalties. This was an aspect Disney had neglected; two years before, needing money, he had sold Mickey Mouse to a children’s tablet manufacturer for a paltry $300. Kamen rushed to Manhattan to open an office called Kay Kamen, Ltd. (cable address: Mickmouse), never let that sort of thing happen again.

Black Ink. Before a year was out, Kamen, bolstered by the 1933 success of Three Little Pigs, had plastered the Disney label on $10 million worth of manufactured goods. After Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) the business became a landslide. The roster of licensees grew to resemble a bluebook of U.S. big business (it includes Standard Oil, Du Pont, General Mills, Armour meats, Life Savers). In Manhattan, Gimbels sold 2,000 pairs of Mickey Mouse sandals in one day; in Chicago, Marshall Field recently had a $10,000 day on $3 sweaters offering a choice of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck or Pluto.

In income, such deals have meant plenty to the Disney-Kamen partnership. Disney’s last financial report lumped merchandising with income from comic strips and commercial pictures, at a yearly net of $1,048,522. Kamen, who makes no financial reports for his own private company, last week reckoned the 1948 gross at $1,000,000—of which, he said, Disney would get $700,000, Kamen $300,000.