Stelios comments on judgement on the easyGroup case against Ms Khammo using easyCosmetic.de to sell perfumes in Germany

The decision issued today by the UK high courts related to a trade mark infringement claim by easyGroup ( as creator and owners of the easy family of brands see www.easyHistory.info ) against a company in Germany using www.easycosmetic.de  to sell cosmetics online mainly in Germany and not available for delivery in the UK. The claim was based on European Union trade marks with the UK sitting as an EU court (as the claim was commenced before Brexit and hence it was complicated by Brexit).

Stelios commented on the decision as follows:

I am pleased that Justice Bacon made the following findings of fact in our favour:
The judgement reads as follows:

1. As regards the UK, easyGroup can rely on the existence of a family of marks at the relevant points in time, (paragraph 102)
2. There is therefore, in my judgment, arguably a link between the orange/black sign [of easyCosmectic.de] and the EASYJET word marks, based on the additional feature of the orange colour used for the orange/black sign. (paragraph 164)
3. Extensive evidence of the in-flight retail sales made by easyJet during the period 2014–2020 in relation to food and drink, cosmetics, perfumes, other toiletries and sunglasses (paragraph 53)

So in plain English the facts are : easyGroup owns a family of brands in the UK in legal terms, the colour orange is strongly associated with the easy family of brands and we have used the easyJet brand to sell cosmetics.

However, we are disappointed that the judge ultimately found that their current use does not infringe our EU trade mark rights. We believe that the judge made various errors of law and we will seek permission to appeal this decision to the UK Court of Appeal as well as continue our separate court case in Germany based on our own locally registered German trademark against www.easycosmetic.de.

In general, in our experience, we have found that there is now a growing trend in the UK for trade mark cases to be decided by general chancery judges at first instance as opposed to trade mark specialist judges. This new trend has resulted in more first instance decisions issued  which are not in favour of trademark owners. In plain English some of the general chancery judges want to allow more competition.  Such decisions are being appealed and ultimately overturned in the Court of Appeal (as easyGroup  have done in the past, for example, in the  easyliveauction case). The Court of Appeal has also expressed its ‘surprise’ at some of these first instance decisions.

We will continue to take legal action against what we believe to be theft of our brands in order  to protect the consumer from being confused that the brand thief is related to us when they are not. easyGroup will continue to donate the majority of its profits to charity via the uk registered charity www.stelios.foundation.