On the mission of the USPA Global Licensing: “Thank you for letting me explain our story to Pololine. USPA properties, which has changed its name to USPA Global Licensing. We are a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the United States Polo Association, and we are For-Profit Corporation. Our mission is to generate a long term source of revenue for the USPA so they can take those royalty income and invest it back into the sport of polo. The USPA Properties was incorporated in 1981 but I didn’t get involved until 2003 and 2004. Quite frankly, was a small company in disarray and we spent the first year to getting the company organised and we have built it up to a 1.6 billion dollar retail. A company, which is a major apparel group in the United States and internationally as well. We are very pleased with their progress and it didn’t happened by chance. Quite frankly, I created a methodical plan from the very beginning hiring a VP of licensing, developing a branding book, a designer, and from the design we give a product design inspiration to our licensees around the world. Then we added from product, merchandising, retail stores design, marketing and then PR. We are very proud of our progress, we built a very successful brand, not only in the United States but internationally. We have over a thousand trademarks registered in 135 countries. Today we have 733 monobrand USPA US Polo Assoc in stores internationally.”
On the USPA Global goals for this year: “The Us Polo Association brand still has a lot of upside potential but we are looking into the future and we are looking at different options. Whether we should be managing other brands whether we should acquire other brands, or acquire companies that can complement what we do. We are looking all those different opportunities, including joint ventures. But it all relates to the apparel business.”
On their collaboration with the USPA: “While the brand continues to grow in popularity and our design inspiration comes from the game itself, we felt that it was only make sense to us to reach out to the USPA and help them market the sport, because wherever the sport goes the brand should go and wherever the brand goes the sport should go. Our motivation on both sides is to create public awareness of the sport to encourage people to buy more product and we like them to be exposed to the sport, so there will go to their local club and hopefully watch polo and, eventually, even try it. So, it made sense to us to reach out the USPA and we offered to help them market the sport. I built a strong professional marketing team and we have been giving the rights to broadcast and stream polo and market and promote those events. This is our first year. We want to broadcast three events, we had a very successful high goal season with the streaming site of the business. We are very excited about a new website that we are creating in conjunction with the USPA that will incorporate the brand as well as the sport.”
On possibilities of broadcasting: “The brand has 2.7 million facebook followers, compare what the USPA has, we want to consolidate that, we want to educate our consumers more about the game so they’ll be interested in following the players, following the teams, and be more loyal to the sport and of course by our product. So, we’ve joined our forces and we have four events that we scheduled to broadcast this year. The streaming for the high goal season here in Florida been very successful. We are broadcasting the US Open Polo Championship, it’ll be aired on Saturday, April 30th at 5pm, so please watch it. And I know it’ll be streamed on Chukker TV as well.”
On their plans for the summer: “In the summer we want to…we’ve reached out to the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club, the East Coast Open, we want to broadcast those two events. Santa Barbara is very close to a large metropolitan area of Los Angeles as well as East Coast Open with Greenwich and New York. We eventually would like to work with Houston, but our goal is to be able to stream more games and build a tour around the United States so that we can broadcast different games and different levels of polo throughout the US. And in our different circuits where we have our circuit governors and multi events where they support and promote polo.”
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