Dispute Continues Over Roxy Label
Call this round three in the 5-year-old court battle over the Roxy label.
Surfwear maker Quiksilver Inc., the $2.3 billion behemoth based in Huntington Beach, Calif., and the Kymsta Corp., a Los Angeles company with $4 million in annual revenues, are headed back to U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Nov. 13 for yet another trial that will determine how these two clothing companies are allowed to use the word “Roxy” in their labels.
Kymsta’s principal label is Roxywear, a contemporary brand sold at Barneys New York, Nordstrom, Anthropologie and Macy’s.
Quiksilver produces a popular youngwomen’s surf collection called Roxy, sold at specialty and department stores. It accounted for 27 percent of Quiksilver’s revenues last year.
Both Kymsta and Quiksilver have been using their labels since the early 1990s. But in 2002, Quiksilver legally challenged Kymsta’s use of “Roxywear” on its main label.
Two years later, after much legal back and forth and a trial, U.S. District Court Judge Dickran Tevrizian decided Quiksilver had waited too long to bring the brand dispute to court, and the two labels could coexist.But he placed certain limitations on Kymsta’s use of the Roxywear name, prohibiting any licensing of the Roxywear name, any advertising involving the Roxywear line and any distribution of the label outside its current list of stores.
Months after the 2004 decision, Art Pereira, who co-founded Kymsta in the early 1990s with his wife, designer Roxanne Heptner, appealed Tevrizian’s ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, arguing the trial should have been decided by a jury instead of just one judge.
In October 2006, a three-judge appealscourt panel agreed with Kymsta and returned the matter to trial in U.S. District Court in front of a jury. The reversal of the lower court’s decision temporarily lifted the judge’s restrictions on the Roxywear label.
“I’m really happy about this,” Pereira said.“It is an opportunity to set the record straight.”
Quiksilver’s attorney, Mike Yoder, said the surfwear company will be presenting the same evidence as it did in the first trial.
“We don’t think the jury will have any difficulties coming to the same conclusion as the judge did in the first trial,” Yoder said.—Deborah Belgum
