THE WORD DEPT | Brand Creation for Universal Music Publishing Group
Project Overview
Client: Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG)
Role: Founder, Strategic & Creative Lead (Magna Opera Group)
Timeline: October 2025 – Present (ongoing retainer)
Project Type: Brand Creation, Product Design, E-Commerce, Licensing & Wholesale System
Most people put a lyric on a shirt and call it merch. I built a brand on the argument that the words are the intellectual property.
UMPG controls the rights to songs that have defined every generation. But a publishing catalog is an archive, not a business you can wear. They needed a brand worthy of the songwriting, built from nothing, in under six months.
The insight that shaped everything: band merch is one artist, one fanbase, and a finite window. A publishing catalog is continuously renewable. Every song is a product. Every songwriter is a story. That reframe is what turned a merchandise idea into a business worth building infrastructure for.
So I set one non-negotiable and designed the whole system around it. Songwriter credits are designed in, never tagged on. Song title and writer attribution live inside the artwork itself, screen-printed, woven, or interior-printed so the credit travels with the product for its entire life. That single rule is what separates The Word Dept from band merch, and it is what lets the same brand scale from one tee to a national retail program without losing the point.
THE WORDS WE NEED COLLECTION
What UMPG owns now: a complete identity and crediting system, the Words We Need anchor collection across six legendary songwriters (Bob Dylan, Christine McVie, Bill Withers, Brian Wilson, Lee Hazlewood, Neil Diamond), editorial photography, a live fulfillment-integrated store, a multi-platform social foundation, and a packaged licensing and wholesale program with partner proposals already developed.
I also brought the brand into the rooms where songwriting is actually celebrated: a Neil Diamond Song Sung Blue screening with live chain-stitching, and a UMusic Shop Camden takeover for The Ivors featuring work from The Cure, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Joy Division, and Franz Ferdinand. Music Week covered the Camden activation as a standout example of catalog-driven brand building.
The engagement was renewed as an ongoing retainer covering brand strategy, creative direction, and continuous product development.
Licensing is usually decoration applied to a product. Here it is the product. When the rights are cleared and the credit is built into the design, the catalog stops being an archive and starts being a business.
