Kodak, once the picture of a dying brand, is having a Moment

Observer

05-07-2025

Even among the flashy signs on the bustling main drag of Seongsu-dong, a former warehouse district turned hipster haven in Seoul, South Korea, the mustard-yellow facade of the Kodak Corner Shop stands out.
On a recent afternoon, the two-story apparel store in what locals call the 'Brooklyn of Seoul' teemed with shoppers. 'Share Moments. Share Life' — a slogan Kodak launched nearly a quarter-century ago — was posted above the door. People browsed shelves of Kodak-branded clothing, including shorts, T-shirts, baseball caps, book bags, sundresses, and sandals.
One of the shoppers, Erye An, 27, a film photographer, modeled a cross-body bag emblazoned with Kodak's signature red-and-yellow, camera-shutter logo, once among the most recognizable symbols in the world.
An, who mentioned that her refrigerator was packed with Kodak film and kimchi, said the shop mirrored the 'dreamy' tones of analog photographs and evoked for her a nostalgic feeling.
Her friend, Lee Young-ji, 30, a marketing student, explained why the shop was so busy: 'I think it's because Kodak hasn't lost its emotional touch.'
The Eastman Kodak Co., a brand as big in its heyday as Apple or Google today and whose sentimental ads left lumps in the throats of generations of consumers, has become a cautionary tale for companies slow to adapt to change. At its headquarters in Rochester, New York, most of the roughly 200 buildings that once stood on its 1,300-acre campus have either been razed or are occupied by other businesses.
But Kodak is having a moment again, mostly overseas, through trademark licensing agreements with manufacturers and retailers of a wide range of products.
The company's logo is being slapped on lifestyle items such as apparel, luggage, eyewear, and paint; on hardware such as solar panels, flashlights and power generators; and on audiovisual equipment such as televisions, voice recorders, and binoculars.
Its ubiquity is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in South Korea, where there are 123 and counting brick-and-mortar stores that just sell products from Kodak Apparel, the name of the clothing line. There are no Kodak Apparel stores in the United States.
'Kodak is now a trending fashion brand in South Korea,' Adrian Tay, an editor at LinkedIn News Asia, said in a post on April 1. 'No, this isn't an April Fool's joke.'
Brand licensing is a growing, if small, part of Kodak's business, accounting for $20 million in revenue last year. That represents a 35% increase from five years ago when branding became a stand-alone segment of the company.
Kodak has never fully recovered from a ruinous decision to bet on film, just as digital photography, a technology it invented, was taking off. Last year, according to the company's financial filings, it recorded $1 billion in revenue, compared with $19 billion in 1990 when 'Kodak Moments' were captured on film everywhere.
The bulk of Kodak's revenues comes from commercial print products and, to a lesser extent, materials related to the motion picture industry.
Kodak currently has 44 brand licensees, according to the company, and some of them make products that many people might consider unrelated to the thing they most associate with the company: photography.
But company officials said elements of photography, such as creativity, telling stories, and preserving memories, were often integrated in the products bearing the Kodak logo.
'Our brand licensing portfolio begins with photography and imaging, but it's much broader than that,' said Clara Fort, the vice president for global brand licensing at the company.
Fort pointed to Kodak's wide-ranging apparel licensing deals in Asia, Europe, and the United States as natural extensions of the brand at a time when images, amplified by social media, are central to daily life.
'With people taking pictures of themselves on social media,' she said, 'we thought, well, why don't we extend our brand to lifestyle?'
Kodak Apparel and its related shops are the brainchild of Lee Jun Kwon, the CEO of Highlight Brands, a South Korean fashion company that has been acquiring licenses to prominent trademarks. The company holds licenses for Diadora and Malbon Golf and has Kodak Apparel outlets in Japan, Taiwan, and China.
'We believed Kodak could not be limited to just the keywords 'camera' and 'film,'' a company representative, Hyejin Park, wrote in an email.
Kodak Apparel dovetails with a resurgence in film photography and a youth culture trend in South Korea known as 'newtro' — a portmanteau that describes a blend of contemporary style ('new') with nostalgia and vintage design ('retro'). American brands that have been 'newtroed' in South Korea include National Geographic, Discovery, CNN, and the aeronautics defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Brand licensing is a prevalent and growing corporate practice, with a global market value estimated at upward of $320 billion. Disney is often cited as the gold standard.
'Licensing is all about bringing to life the emotional connection between consumers and the brands they care about,' said Maura Regan, the president of Licensing International, a trade organization.
The Kodak warm fuzzies were once deeply embedded in the company's hometown, Rochester, where the company employed 60,000 people and was the leading benefactor of the city's cultural institutions before it filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Today, Kodak employs about 1,300 people in the city, and its residents are more likely to regard the company with bitterness than as a paragon of branding.
Yet in May, Kodak was in the running for Best Corporate Brand honors at the Licensing International Excellence Awards in Las Vegas alongside household names such as Jeep, Goodyear, and the Girl Scouts. Though not ultimately winner of the prize, the company did win the distinction two years ago.
This year, Kodak took home two other awards, one for its partnership with Highlight and another for a collaboration with American streetwear company HUF to put Kodak logos and images on hoodies, gold lockets and skateboards, among other items.
In recent years, Kodak has partnered with Mattel on pink Barbie cameras and printers, and signed a deal allowing EssilorLuxottica, the European eyewear conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley, to use the Kodak name in perpetuity. Kodak officials said the company was exploring options in the gaming, smart home and health care industries.
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Company officials said they were being thoughtful about licensing the brand to products that were aligned with Kodak's DNA. But some marketing experts wondered whether the company was venturing too far afield.
Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, called the assortment of deals 'striking' and said that while they served to keep Kodak 'out there' they suggested a sense of desperation.
'In a way, when you see this happening, it's a little bit sad because it really does indicate just how far the Kodak brand has fallen,' Calkins said. 'This is characteristic of a brand that has come upon hard times.'
Brad VanAuken, the former head of marketing at Hallmark Cards, is a brand strategy consultant who lives in a suburb of Rochester and worked on a branding campaign for the city's George Eastman Museum, named and dedicated to Kodak's founder.
VanAuken said he was surprised at the extent of Kodak's foray into licensing but added that the company appeared to have 'momentum' and an opportunity to reposition its brand if it could illustrate a link between the products bearing its logo and its rich heritage.
'If they say the brand is about something broader and they want to widen the perception of Kodak, then I get it,' VanAuken said. 'Whether putting Kodak on all this merchandise helps consumers to think that that's what Kodak is about is another question.'
Eric Kunsman, a photographer from Rochester who works around the country, recently recalled spotting young people wearing Kodak clothes in Los Angeles.
The sight warmed his heart, he said and reminded him of Rochester's halcyon days when Kodak was on top of the world.
'I got this sense of hometown pride,' Kunsman said. 'Even though I knew they weren't made in Rochester, to me, it was still Kodak.'
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