Collectible stickers app hits goal target

AVERY busy year is expected by Fantom, a Dublin technology company that has developed online digital sticker albums, a 21st century version of collectible trading cards.

Since launching an app which allows fans to collect and swap stickers online early last year, Fantom has signed agreements with Derby County, Queens Park Rangers, and Wolves, as well as Impact Wresting in the US and the National Science Museum in the UK.

Co-founder and CEO Paul Healy says Fantom is set to achieve a significant breakthrough this year into the digital collectible game card sector, a market which is expected to be worth $560m (€410m) globally in 2013.

The company is now in discussion with a range of sports organisations, including three or four English Premier League clubs. “We are also partnering with some large media companies with rights to sports and entertainment content that will take us to another level,” said Mr Healy. “We have a number of deals in the pipeline and we will be making a major announcement within weeks.”

The company’s platform can be used to create digital sticker apps for Facebook, iPads, and smartphones “The app offers brand extension, engagement and market research, as well as opportunities to monetise from existing content,” says Mr Healy who sees opportunities to sell to TV, celebrities and bands, baseball and soccer league clubs in the US.

By the end of 2013, the company aims to have 25 clients for its software: “We are projecting an increase in our turnover by a factor of ten this year and by a factor of four in 2014,’’ reveals Mr Healy, adding that Fantom has projected that the number of monthly active users of its sticker albums is set to reach 500,000 this year.

Digital collectible games market are a recent phenomenon and Mr Healy admits that getting the company off the ground was an uphill struggle in 2011.

“The paper market was huge but there was no strong digital presence. We had to educate the market.’’

A former technology journalist who was managing director of Jobfinder.ie which sold for €10m in 2000, Mr Healy set up Lightkeeper Media in 2009. “The original idea was to find some way of monetising the social media of famous people,” he says.

Participating in the DCU Ryan Academy accelerator programme in early 2011, Mr Healy brought in €30,000 in investment and set the company on a new track, digital collectible cards. Now trading as Fantom, the company secured €490,000 in seed funding from AIB, Enterprise Ireland, and private investors by the end of the year.

Launching on the market in early 2012, it started negotiating to buy content rights from brands, including the UK Science Museum toy company Mattel. In August, it signed a deal with Impact Wresting and launched an app which had 15,000 players within three months.

Fantom originally set out to target children from 7 to 13 years old but found the market was a lot larger. “We found that older kids and young adults were collecting as well, and now the age group from 14 to 17 and from 18 to 23 are the main groups,” says Mr Healy.

The company’s most significant breakthrough came in late 2012 when it partnered with Derby County for the launch of an online sticker album. Fantom thus began providing software to Derby, earning a monthly licence fee and sharing revenue earned thought the sale of online stickers.

“To start with, we needed to licence content to show the quality of what we had developed, but now we have become a software platform company,’’ says Mr Healy. The company has signed a similar agreement with Queens Park Rangers and Wolves.

In January, it launched stickers for the UK Science Museum and this month it will have a product launch for Queens Park Rangers. The first Mattel product, a Monster High sticker album, will come on stream in May.

Fantom will also partner with Topps Trading Cards, the market leader in collectible cards, to launch an English Soccer Team sticker album in May.

Fantom now employs f five and is set to recruit three this year with a view to increasing the workforce to 15 next year. Mr Healy is anticipating a very bright future. “Fantom has the potential to be a €30m-plus software business employing more than 30 people within five years.”