House Of Zana Defeats Zara’s Trademark Opposition

Trademark

from the a-fashionable-win dept

A couple of months back, we discussed a bit of a David v. Goliath trademark situation occurring in the UK. Zara is a massive fashion brand, well known throughout Europe. House of Zana is a small boutique clothier that attempted to trademark the full name of the company, “House of Zana”, only to have Zara file an opposition claiming that “Zara” and “Zana” are so close that it would cause confusion with the public.

As I pointed out in the post, the whole thing was quite silly. While “Zana” and “Zara” are indeed similar, “House of Zana” and “Zara” are not. Given that the trademark was for the full three-word business name, that distinction is important. Zara’s rebuttal to that was that “House of” is a generic and common manner in which to refer to a fashion brand, which is belied by the fact that Zara’s name is “Zara” and not “House of Zara”. House of Zana pointed out that Zara also didn’t provide any actual evidence of customer confusion, likely because none actually exists.

Fortunately, a tribunal appears to agree with us that this is all a needless exercise and is allowing House of Zana to move forward with its application. That does not mean, however, that all of this hasn’t come with a cost to Amber Kotrri, owner of the company.

She said the judgement was a “genuine weight off my shoulders”.

“It’s been well over a year and very stressful on my home life, as a mum of three young children, as well as on the business as there’s been hours and hours of preparing documents of evidence,” she said.

She goes into further detail about how she had to prepare evidence for the dispute around the due date of her third child, how she got news of the decision via email while she was out with her family and was too nervous to even open it at first, and on and on.

All of this occurred while Zara played a bunch of make believe by arguing that House of Zana would be a major threat to Zara’s business should it get the trademark for which it applied. Not only is that obviously absurd, but thanks to the tribunal we’re all about to see just how silly the claim will play out in real life. House of Zana will get its mark and I guess everyone at the corporate offices for Zara will be holding their breaths waiting for the business to crumble as a result.

And, of course, House of Zana wasn’t the only victim of Zara’s bullying.

Mrs. Kotrri said she had also been in contact with more than 10 other small business owners who had been contacted by the fashion company asking them to rebrand because of similarities with their names.

And she has reportedly told them to go fight Zara every step of the way. Hopefully, her win will encourage that sort of thing, which, in turn, will hopefully encourage Zara to back the hell off of its trademark bullying ways.

Filed Under: fashion, trademark
Companies: house of zana, zara