ONE Championship appointed CAA Brand Management as its official licensing agent across Asia, the Singapore-based mixed martial arts promoter announced Tuesday. The deal gives CAA's consumer products division control over merchandise strategy, retail partnerships, and brand extensions in the region where ONE generates 95% of its live gate revenue.
CAA Brand Management, a division of Creative Artists Agency, will handle licensing for apparel, accessories, gaming products, and collectibles. The appointment formalizes a relationship that began informally last year when CAA advisors sat in on ONE's conversations with Thai retail chains. ONE runs roughly 50 live events annually across Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Attendance averaged 8,200 per show in 2024, down 12% from 2022 as the promoter shifted venues from arenas to soundstages for its Amazon Prime Video broadcasts.
The move matters because ONE has struggled to monetize its audience beyond media rights. The company sold a minority stake to Guggenheim Partners in 2021 at a $1.4 billion valuation, then spent two years pitching U.S. networks before settling on a non-exclusive Amazon deal worth an estimated $8 million annually. Merchandise revenue accounted for less than 4% of total revenue in 2023, according to two people familiar with the financials. UFC, by comparison, books roughly 12% of revenue from consumer products, and its Asia business is a rounding error.
CAA brings a different playbook. The agency built Bud Light's NFL licensing program and structured Travis Kelce's consumer deals before his dating life became the product. Its head of brand management, Marc Geiger's former lieutenant at WME before the CAA merger, has spent the past eighteen months mapping Asia's retail fragmentation. ONE's fan base skews male, 18-34, with household incomes under $40,000 in purchasing-power terms. That's below the threshold for premium athleisure but ideal for mobile gaming tie-ins and convenience-store apparel.
The real test is whether CAA can extract value from ONE's intellectual property without a dominant athlete. The promotion's roster includes 180 fighters under contract, but no one moves Pay-Per-View needles the way Conor McGregor or Jon Jones do. Demetrious Johnson, the former UFC flyweight champion who joined ONE in 2018, retired last year. Current champions are celebrities in their home markets—Rodtang Jitmuangnon in Thailand, Stamp Fairtex among female fighters—but lack English fluency for Western brand partnerships. CAA will likely lean into regional deals: energy drinks in Manila, fight shorts at Bangkok department stores, YouTube creator collabs.
Watch for CAA's first product drops in Q2 2025. The agency typically launches with fast-fashion capsules to test price sensitivity before committing to inventory. ONE's next major event is in Bangkok on March 23, which would align with a merchandise push during Muay Thai season. Also worth tracking: whether CAA negotiates participation rights in ONE's next funding round. The agency has taken equity in three sports properties since 2022, usually in exchange for fee deferrals.
ONE Championship has been hunting a second revenue stream since its Amazon deal fell short of internal targets. The licensing appointment suggests management believes the answer is retail distribution, not broadcast expansion. CAA's cut will run 10-15% of wholesale revenue, standard for the category. If the agency can't generate $15 million annually from licensing within thirty-six months, the contract includes performance outs.
The takeaway
ONE taps CAA to build an Asia licensing business after its U.S. media strategy underperformed; first products ship Q2 2025.
one championshipcaalicensingmmaasiamerchandise
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.