Roxywear Seeks to License Brand
Roxywear by Roxx, a contemporary label sold at Barneys New York and Macy’s, may be locked in a heated battle over its name, but that isn’t stopping the small Los Angeles company from licensing its name.
Even though a trial is scheduled for November, the Kymsta Corp., which has been making Roxywear since the early 1990s, announced on Aug. 21 it will be working with Brandt & Co. to license its label around the world.
“Roxywear by Roxx is a strong brand and should be able to capture additional markets through licensing,” said Larry Brandt, president of Brandt & Co. in Los Angeles.
Art Pereira, who co-founded Kymsta in the early 1990s with his wife, designer Roxanne Heptner, said he is looking forward to expanding the brand as quickly as possible.
He may need to. His company has been in a five-year legal tussle with Quiksilver Inc., a surf brand in Huntington Beach, Calif., whose Roxy label has also been around since the early 1990s. The label is geared toward a juniors customer and makes up about 27 percent of Quiksilver’s revenues.
The two sides are scheduled to go to trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles this November to decide who has the right to use the Roxy name.
It’s a tale of David and Goliath. Quiksilver is a $2.4 billion company that brought the suit in 2002 against Roxywear, a relative blip of a company whose annual revenues are $4 million.
The two sides were in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in 2004, where Judge Dickran Tevrizian decided that the two companies could both use the name in their labels, but he put some restrictions on Roxywear, such as prohibiting any licensing of the brand.
Kymsta appealed Tevrizian’s ruling. Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled the case must be retried in U.S. District Court because the judge had dismissed the jury and made the decision by himself.
That means that the U.S. District Court judge’s restrictions on the Roxywear label are temporarily lifted until a new trial settles the matter. —Deborah Belgum
