Valencia Firm Master of Product Placement Domain

After starting out as a home-based business Stephanie Weier has grown her product placement and rights permission firm into a global enterprise. Domain Partners Group LLC, headquartered in Valencia, has expanded outside of Southern California and has increased its service offerings in recent years. The company has three separate divisions which handle rights clearances, product and celebrity branding and a website reporting on placement deals in Hollywood, respectively. “There are a lot of hurdles a film has to go through to get distributed and part of that is the clearance,” said Weier, who runs the company with her husband, Larry Weier, and her brother, Todd Bulgarino. In the 10 years since Weier started the company, Domain Partners has worked on more than 1,500 films, television shows and videos. In this summer’s romantic-comedy “Crazy Stupid Love,” the company was responsible for Steve Carell looking stylish in Canali suits. Product Domain also did the music clearances for the 2008 film “Every Little Step” and negotiated using Alka-Seltzer and Kellogg’s on billboards in the video game “LA Noire” released in May. As the intermediary between the brand owners and film, television, music video and video game producers, Weier and her team negotiate the deals. They also vet the scripts and work out how the products appear on screen. Domain Partners will even create fictitious products and the logos that go with them. Expansion plans Domain Partners has a coordinator in London to open up that market after the European Union relaxed standards on product placement in television and movies. Weier’s younger brother, Bulgarino, oversees the Nashville office which opened this year to bring in business from companies in the eastern part of the U.S. Bulgarino said taking on those responsibilities allowed him to expand his sister’s business and make a career change after being in the technology field for 15 years. He and Weier set clear expectations about their working relationship from the start. “I was clear what I would do and how I would do it, and she was clear about what she wanted,” Bulgarino said. Larry Weier, Stephanie’s husband, joined Domain Partners in December after retiring from Universal Studios where he worked in production services for 25 years. Stephanie Weier, also a veteran of Universal, said operating the company with her husband has been interesting because the two of them have different management styles. She said the couple agreed she would continue handling day to day operations. However, she runs ideas by Larry as he eases himself into the business. The company also often partners with other companies to expand its reach and attract new clients, Weier said. For example, the company partnered with Calabasas-based public relations firm Zende to use social media to get the word out about the shows and films featuring its clients’ products. Domain Partners benefits from the partnership with Zende by getting new clients, while Zende benefits by getting its clients the services that Domain offers, said Arshia Rios, the owner of Zende. Rios said her clients, many of them in the sport of polo, understand the importance of media marketing and public relations, but don’t know how brands get placed in movies and television shows. “This is a great way to do a lot of great branding for clients who do not have a lot of time to think about it,” Rios said.