Protecting your brand

Rebecca Dowdeswell shares her advice for other beauty professionals on trademarking business names following a long-running dispute

Cosmetics giant L’Oréal first opposed the registration of my trademarks and asked me to change the name of my business back in September 2022. It said that my company name – nkd – is “confusingly similar” to the name of Urban Decay’s NAKED eyeshadow palettes.

For the first year or so of the dispute, I was in what’s called a “cooling-offperiod” with L’Oréal, whereby I had hoped to come to a co-existence agreement which would have allowed me to continue to trade as nkd without impacting or infringing on the NAKED trademarks. Unfortunately, no agreement was reached and I am now waiting for a hearing so that the UK Intellectual Property Office can decide on the outcome of this case. Until the IPO makes that decision, I am allowed to carry on trading as nkd.

Challenging times

I’ve faced huge cash challenges since this began which has been very hard; more than £30,000 in direct legal fees. I’ve always prided myself on running the company very well, so to find myself in a situation whereby I’m in debt and at risk of running out of cash has felt both scary and embarrassing.

As a result, I had to take the extremely difficult and painful decision to close my original and flagship Nottingham waxing and beauty salon. Although I’ll always feel sad and I often feel commercial regret about some of those decisions, I also know that at the time I made them they were the right decisions for me.

Lessons learned

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Among the many pieces of advice I’ve been given are that David very rarely beats Goliath and that to try and fight a global giant like L’Oréal on a point of principle is probably not a very sensible thing to do.

Sound legal advice is extremely expensive and not within the financial reach of most salon owners. I could never recommend that extortionate lawyers’ fees are what salon owners should be spending their hardearned profits on.

Preserving my mental and physical health during a prolonged period of extreme stress has been a significant challenge. I’ve learnt that my own health comes first and that if I don’t look after myself, I can’t look after other people.

So, I would urge other salon owners to keep their beauty businesses in perspective. As small business owners, we pour blood, sweat and tears into building our companies but at the end of the day, it’s just work. If someone does wrong by your beauty business, think about how much it really matters in the grand scheme of things.

I’m definitely guilty of caring too much about nkd and I’ve paid the price for that. The egal fees are just the tip of the iceberg and the indirect emotional and non-financial costs are so much harder to quantify.

Bearing that in mind, I would say that from my experience, the most pragmatic advice I could give would be to choose your business name wisely, but regretfully, it is probably wiser to not try and trademark unless you really need to.

Finally, I’ve learnt that people are really kind. I’ve always taken such pride and care in the running of nkd and a lot of people have recognised this and have reached out to support me during these last few very difficult years. I wouldn’t still be trading now if it wasn’t for the goodwill and help of certain suppliers and stakeholders, and I’ll be forever grateful to those people and companies for that.

I feel like there’s also a lesson in terms of making sure that you always show respect, care and compassion to others. Then when you need it, it’ll come back to you.

Rebecca Dowdeswell is founder and owner of nkd, a chain of beauty salons that focus solely on waxing. nkd also delivers wax training courses and has developed a waxing aftercare product range.