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
Project Type: Brand Creation, Product, E-Commerce, Licensing & Wholesale
A publishing catalog isn’t merch. It’s a renewable product system.
UMPG represents songs that have lived across generations. The opportunity was to build a consumer brand around that catalog without reducing the songwriting to another logo tee.
I built The Word Dept. from the ground up in under six months: the name, identity, product system, e-commerce, creative direction, licensing structure and wholesale strategy.
The idea behind it was simple.
A band has one catalog and one fanbase. A music publisher has thousands of songs, writers, stories and cultural moments. Every song can become a product. Every songwriter gives the brand another reason to exist.
The system had one non-negotiable: the songwriter stays visible.
Credits are designed into the product itself, not added as legal copy afterward. Song title and writer attribution travel with the piece through screen printing, woven details and interior treatments.
That decision turned the project from a merchandise program into something that could scale without losing what made it meaningful.
THE WORDS WE NEED
The first full collection translated songs from Bob Dylan, Christine McVie, Bill Withers, Brian Wilson, Lee Hazlewood and Neil Diamond into product built around ideas like hope, connection, independence and community.
From there, the brand expanded into a live fulfillment-integrated store, editorial photography, social channels, licensing proposals and a wholesale program designed to bring the catalog into retail and brand collaborations.
The Word Dept. also moved into the places where songwriting is actually celebrated, including a Neil Diamond Song Sung Blue event and a UMusic Shop Camden takeover around The Ivors.
The original build became an ongoing engagement covering brand strategy, creative direction and continuous product development.
The catalog was always valuable. The job was giving it another way to create value.
Licensing usually starts with a product and adds someone else’s IP to it.
The Word Dept. starts with the IP.
Once the rights, credit and design system work together, the catalog stops behaving like an archive and starts behaving like a business.
