Increasingly, the Wrights are also found in the marketplace. A small Dayton company, The Wright Brothers USA LLC, has slowly guided licensing of the Wright brothers’ name and images to sell carefully selected products — mainly bicycles and watches — for a couple of years.
Now, that market presence has gone global. Recently, the e-commerce site TheWrightBrothersStore.com quietly went live, open to orders for flight jackets, luggage, sunglasses and more from around the world. Most of the products are made in the U.S.
Global commerce is more than turning on a web site and hoping for the best. Dave Lightle, chief executive of Wright Brothers USA — along with partners Kenneth Botts and Doug Knapp — want to make sure orders don’t exceed the ability of manufacturing partners to fulfill them. Quality is the firm’s watchword, the three say.
“It’s an historical name that has been untarnished for 110 years,” Lightle said. “The (Wright) family cares about that.”
While the Wrights are a household name in Dayton, the company is not. We sat down with Lightle at the Firefly building recently for Three Questions. This is edited and condensed.
Q: The new site went live May 25. What has reaction been?
Lightle: "It's already bringing in some orders. That's good because we're basically using this period to test everything — to make sure the system is working and the deliveries are good and all that. We've taken care of glitches and things, so it's going pretty well.
“We have deliberately come out of the blocks with very little promotion. What we’re doing is just promotion by increments. We’re starting out against a target audience of just a few thousand people — aviation enthusiasts, aircraft owners, a few pilots and certain groups and associations that we’re talking to.
“What we’re doing, very deliberately speaking, we expect to build up to the holiday season then, where we might go a little bit more full-bore with advertising against the whole aviation target audience.
“But for right now, all through the summer, into the fall, we’re just going to be talking to a very controlled group.”
Q: From the start you’ve been concerned about quality. When you speak with the Wright family, what concerns do they express?
Lightle: "The main thing is protecting the integrity of the name. We can't afford to have any big foul-ups, either operationally or making any mistakes in communications about the Wright brothers.
“The Wright family doesn’t approve everything that we do. But we do keep them informed; we do show them things as we go, as a courtesy. They cannot be involved on the business side as a foundation (the Wright Family Foundation). We straddle that fence every appropriately, aware of the legalities of it.
“But it’s a matter of getting the messaging down, making sure this is how we want the Wright brothers packaged. Because they are finally, after all these years, being packaged. Yes, the family does care. And so far so good.”
Q: Outline the arrangement: How are proceeds shared?
Lightle: The (family) foundation here in Dayton is a member of the Dayton Foundation. … They own the trademark. But since it is a foundation, it can't do business. So it has licensed it out to us. We are the exclusive global licensor of the Wright brothers trademark.
“We earmark 10 percent (of sales) for the royalties. Because we’re the licensor and the seller, we get 60 percent of the royalty, the family gets 40 percent of the royalty. It just so happens in this case, we’re the licensor and the maker and the distributor and seller. … We’re footing the entire bill for the establishment of the brand and the promotion of the brand worldwide. That’s why we have this arrangement.”
Know someone who can handle Three Questions? We're looking for behind-the-scenes-but-still fascinating Miami Valley residents with something to say. Send your suggestions to tom.gnau@coxinc.com.
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