Brand licensing is capitalism's version of necromancy.

Reviving dead brands for one last round of commercial exploitation.

The model is simple, seductive, and deeply cynical.

A licensing group buys the intellectual property of a failed brand......just the name, trademarks, and logos. Not the stores, not the people, not the product capability. Just the shell. They then license that brand to a dozen different manufacturers, each paying royalties (usually 5–15% of sales) to slap the logo on whatever they sell.

You'll find these brands scattered everywhere, usually in discount bins and airport shops:
• Juicy Couture perfume at TJ Maxx, long after the tracksuits stopped trending.
• Nautica bedding and luggage in outlet stores, miles from its maritime roots.
• Aéropostale T-shirts still sold in Latin America through licensees that never stopped printing.
• Barneys New York, once the temple of fashion, now a private label inside another department store.
• Brooks Brothers "athleisure" lines made overseas under a license that no founder would recognise.
• Even Toys R Us, reduced to a logo in an airport terminal pop-up, still promising joy that no longer exists.

Consumers aren't stupid. They know the difference between a brand and its corpse. But at $19.99, they'll buy the corpse anyway.

These brands will never come back. Because they're not being rebuilt, they're being flogged. Each licensing deal extracts the last drops of equity, diluting meaning in exchange for margin. The name becomes a husk, traded between licensors until it's worthless.

And yet the machine keeps going, because it has to.