Williams leads F1's licensing grid

When the Williams x DAN DA DAN deal was announced, most of the coverage treated it as a Williams partnership. It is only partially. Here’s what you should be thinking about when building a licensing operation of your own.

There are two entirely separate IP systems operating in F1, controlled by different entities, generating revenue for different parties.

Formula One Licensing BV — a Liberty Media subsidiary — owns the series-level marks: the F1 logo, "Formula 1," "Formula One," "Grand Prix," and all related trademarks. Any product that carries the F1 logo on it, whether a Hot Wheels car at £1.25 or a LEGO Technic set at £230, requires a licence from this entity and pays royalties back to Liberty.

The official F1 Store, operated in partnership with Fanatics, runs through this channel. So does the EA Sports video game, the LEGO deal, the Mattel Hot Wheels deal, and the LVMH global partnership — all of which were announced or expanded in the last two seasons and all of which generate licensing revenue that sits inside what Liberty reports as "Other F1 revenue," a bucket that also includes hospitality and freight and that represented 20.3% of F1's total $3.9 billion revenue in 2025.

Team-level licensing is an entirely separate system, controlled by each team. The McLaren papaya colourway, the Red Bull bull, the Ferrari prancing horse - each team owns its own marks and licenses them independently. When Richard Mille produces a Ferrari-branded watch, those royalties flow to Ferrari S.p.A. When PUMA makes a McLaren kit, the terms of that arrangement are between McLaren Racing and PUMA, with the financial relationship sitting entirely outside Liberty's reported numbers.

The Williams x DAN DA DAN deal operates at the team level. Williams licenses its name, its racing heritage, and its visual identity into the product. UNDONE designs and manufactures the watches and apparel. Mainichi Broadcasting System licenses the DAN DA DAN IP into the product alongside Williams. UNDONE, as the manufacturer, pays royalties to both Williams and MBS each quarter based on wholesale sell-through.

The minimum guarantee—the floor the licensee commits to regardless of sales performance—de-risks the arrangement for both IP holders and forces UNDONE to take the product seriously, which is precisely the structural purpose that minimum guarantees have served in licensing for the last four decades.

The replication principle: Before you build a licensing programme, understand what IP you actually own and whom you're licensing to. Series-level marks and team-level marks are not interchangeable, and a licensee who wants to use both needs two separate agreements. If you're a team, your marks are the asset — the question is whether those marks mean enough to a manufacturer for them to commit a minimum guarantee to the right to use them.

Across all eleven teams, licensing deals cluster into five categories: collectables and toys, eyewear, memorabilia and race-used parts, fashion capsules, and digital. The breadth of any team's licensing programme is one of the clearest signals of how seriously they treat their IP as a commercial asset distinct from their sponsorship portfolio.

LEGO and Hot Wheels are the two series-wide licensees, covering every team through master agreements with Liberty Media. Within that, teams hold additional bilateral deals — the Technic McLaren MCL39 at £200 is a McLaren-specific licence built on top of the series agreement and timed to celebrate the 2025 championship. Aston Martin holds a separate LEGO Technic Valkyrie hypercar deal brokered by IMG. Memento Exclusives holds licences to produce show cars for all teams, previewing the 2026 grid at the London Toy Fair in January. Amalgam Collection — producing handmade 1:8 and 1:4-scale models priced at £1,500–£8,000 — holds bilateral deals with Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull, reflecting which teams command the premium collector market.

SunGod holds confirmed licensee agreements with both McLaren (six consecutive years, now producing LN1 and OP81 frames co-designed with Norris and Piastri) and Williams. No other team has a publicly documented eyewear licensee for 2026, making SunGod the dominant player in this category across the two teams where it matters most commercially.

F1 Authentics holds licensing agreements across all teams to sell official memorabilia, show cars, and re-engineered car parts - wheel rim tables, skid plank pieces in acrylic, framed race-used components - with prices ranging from €701 to €105,263 for full simulators. This is the only category where every team is covered by a single licensee.

This is where the spread between teams is widest, and where Williams sits in a category of its own.

Atlassian Williams F1 Team — eight confirmed consumer product licensees, all built over roughly 18 months under Luke Timmins:

→ Carl Friedrik (high-end travel goods — suitcases and backpacks)
→ AllSaints (fashion collections)
→ Pedal Mafia (cycling apparel)
→ Reflo (sustainable apparel and official team travel kit, 2025)
→ Coachbuilt Whisky
→ SunGod (eyewear)
→ LEGO (collectables)
→ UNDONE x DAN DA DAN (watches and anime capsule, 2026)

McLaren Mastercard F1 Team:

→ Reiss (travel wear, multi-year from 2023)
→ SunGod (eyewear, sixth consecutive year)
→ LEGO (including the championship-winning MCL39 Technic set at £200)

Cadillac F1 Team:

→ Tommy Hilfiger Race Specials (city-specific drops for Miami, Austin, and Las Vegas — merchandise sold publicly at £39.90–£229.90)

Aston Martin Aramco:

→ RS No.9 Carnaby x Rolling Stones (limited hoodies, tees, and caps)
→ LEGO (AMR23 Speed Champions set, brokered by IMG)

Visa Cash App RB:

→ HUGO (fashion capsules and limited edition drops — the most fashion-forward brief of any team kit deal on the grid)

Scuderia Ferrari and Oracle Red Bull Racing have the deepest scale-model licensing programmes through Amalgam and Minichamps, but the fewest documented fashion-capsule licensees — their brand pull is sufficient that sponsorship handles the lifestyle positioning, reducing the pressure on licensing to do the audience-expansion work.

Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS, Haas, Alpine, and Audi have no publicly confirmed independent fashion-capsule licensees for 2026, beyond their series-wide LEGO and Hot Wheels coverage.

→ EA Sports (series-wide licence covering all eleven teams and driver likenesses — the F1 video game franchise, annual release)

→ F1 Store operated with Fanatics (Liberty's direct-to-consumer channel, through which every team's IP flows under sublicense)

Who dominates

By volume of individual licensees: Williams leads the grid — eight confirmed consumer product licensees across travel goods, fashion, cycling, spirits, sustainable apparel, eyewear, collectables, and anime, all built over roughly 18 months.

By brand premium per unit: Ferrari and McLaren, through Amalgam's £5,000–£8,000 handmade scale models — the highest royalty-per-unit of any licensing category on the grid.

By raw distribution reach: No team-level programme touches what LEGO and Hot Wheels deliver at the series level. The Hot Wheels F1 Single 1:64 was the world's number-one selling vehicle toy in 2024, according to Circana. A £1.25 car in Walmart is a different kind of reach than a £200 Technic set — and F1 now has both ends of that market.

By strategic sophistication: Williams, specifically because of what Timmins has built — not the biggest programme by revenue, but the most deliberately constructed as an audience growth tool rather than a merchandise operation.

The gap: Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes could run the deepest licensing programmes on the grid if they chose to. They don't need to, because their sponsorship revenues and on-track profile do the audience work for them. The teams that need licensing most are the ones using it best.

The replication principle: The teams with the deepest licensing programmes are not the ones with the biggest sponsorship revenues - they are the ones who treat their IP as a separate commercial asset that needs its own distribution strategy, its own category management, and its own person responsible for it.

The teams with thin licensing portfolios are typically the ones where merchandise is an afterthought to the sponsorship operation rather than a parallel revenue stream in its own right.

Steve Starobinsky runs licensing at Pudgy Penguins and tracks 296 deals across an eleven-stage funnel. His framing of what licensing actually is cuts through most of the noise: licensing is one party taking another party's distribution pipeline.

That reframes what Williams is doing with DAN DA DAN entirely. Williams is not in the watch business or the anime business - it is making its global F1 platform, its Japanese Grand Prix presence, and 48 years of racing heritage available to UNDONE and MBS in exchange for a royalty on every unit sold. UNDONE brings the manufacturing capability and distribution network. MBS brings the anime IP. Each party is accessing something the other has spent years building.

The financial structure underneath that runs on two numbers. The royalty rate - typically 8 to 15% of wholesale in sports licensing - is what the licensee pays per unit sold. The minimum guarantee is the floor commitment the licensee makes regardless of sales performance, which de-risks the deal for the IP holder and, as Starobinsky puts it, forces the manufacturer to make a good product, market it properly, and take it seriously. For Williams, the minimum guarantee UNDONE has committed to is the signal that this is a real commercial bet rather than a badge exercise.

Starobinsky's most urgent warning is what the licensing industry calls slicensing - where an IP holder distributes the same licence across so many manufacturers in the same category that no individual licensee can get meaningful shelf presence, and the minimum guarantee becomes an obligation nobody can justify. In a three-party deal where UNDONE is the sole manufacturer of this specific product, that risk is structurally eliminated. There is no competing version of a Williams x DAN DA DAN watch, and the exclusivity is priced into the minimum guarantee accordingly.

The principle that ultimately explains Williams' entire licensing strategy is one that Starobinsky states plainly: licensing only works when you apply it to a brand that already means something, because a random brand times a major IP is just the IP. Williams has nine constructors' titles, 114 grand prix wins, and a visual identity that a manufacturer in any category can build a product story around. That equity is what makes UNDONE's minimum guarantee viable, what makes AllSaints and Carl Friedrik and Reflo each willing to put a floor commitment behind the right to carry the Williams name. The licensing programme is only as deep as the brand underneath it.

The replication principle: The minimum guarantee is the market's verdict on your brand. If manufacturers are not willing to commit to one, the brand is not yet strong enough to license. Build it first, then license it.

The question worth asking: Which communities are you not currently reaching, and is your brand strong enough that a manufacturer in those communities would put a minimum guarantee behind the right to carry your name?