My Story 

In 2022, the US$250 billion French cosmetics giant L’Oréal launched a series of damaging, unnecessary, and overtly aggressive trade mark actions against my small company. L’Oréal claims that the name nkd ( ) is “confusingly similar” to the name of its NAKED eyeshadow palettes sold by Urban Decay and insists that I rebrand. 

Rebranding would cost tens of thousands of pounds and undo over a decade of brand building. By 2022, I had already been trading as nkd ( ) for 13 years - with valid trade marks in place for 10 of those years. In fact, nkd ( ) launched in the UK the year before Urban Decay even hit UK shelves in 2010. Our businesses operate in entirely different fields: nkd ( ) specialises in waxing and hair removal; NAKED is a sub-brand for a limited range of make-up products. There’s never been any evidence of any customer confusion. And of course our two brand names are spelt and pronounced differently. 

So I said no. I refused to roll over — but I never imagined that standing my ground would come at such an immense personal and professional cost. 

To date, I’ve spent over £30,000 + VAT in legal fees. In a painful and traumatic twist to this story, my award-winning Nottingham salon, once the heart of my business and everything that the nkd ( ) brand was originally built around, is now closed. The opportunity cost of that closure is immense, but still dwarfed by the emotional toll this has so needlessly taken. 

On 5th November 2025, I finally faced L’Oréal at a full UK Intellectual Property Office hearing after more than three years of correspondence and delay. I’m now waiting for the written decision, which could still take many months. Even if the decision ultimately goes in my favour, the UKIPO’s limited costs regime means I’m likely to recover only a small fraction of what I’ve spent defending my own name – a few thousand pounds at most against tens of thousands in legal fees, the loss of my flagship salon and years of stress. That’s not justice.

While this case is personal to me, it highlights two much wider and deeply concerning issues: first, a flawed UK trade mark system that is slow, costly, and heavily weighted in favour of those with the deepest pockets — allowing powerful companies to exploit procedural loopholes, delay tactics and outdated cost limits to wear down smaller opponents. And second, an increasing trend of global corporations using their financial muscle to launch unnecessary trade mark challenges — not to protect genuine intellectual property, but to intimidate and suppress fair competition. These actions are rarely scrutinised or penalised, meaning the bullies effectively face no consequences.

Alongside working hard to get my business fully back on track after these financially and emotionally draining few years, I’m determined to use this experience to shine a light on L’Oréal’s conduct — and the hypocrisy of a company that publicly champions empowerment and ethics while privately engaging in aggressive, obstructive behaviour that destroys smaller competitors. My goal now is to help drive real reform: to make the UK trade mark system fairer, faster, and more accountable — and to ensure that no business, however small, has to endure what I have in simply defending what is rightfully theirs.

Thank you for taking an interest in my story.