These days you might find a Pokémon in your Crocs. Or Polly Pocket in your Airbnb. Big-name brand collaborations are very much in vogue. It’s unsurprising: successful collaborations can be hugely beneficial to both brands, and when it goes well, the positive attributes of each brand cross-pollinate.
Collaborations can be a powerful tool to enhance brand awareness, expand reach, and engage new customer segments. But intellectual property (IP) issues can arise, particularly around ownership and use of the parties’ existing brands and any new IP created in the collaboration.
The key is to ensure that guardrails are set up from the beginning, to try to head off any problems that might arise. At the heart of it, a brand collaboration is a trade mark licence: I will let you use my trade mark if you let me use yours. But the agreement must work harder than that. It must detail exactly how the respective trade marks are to be used and for how long. The parties will also need to consider how things will work in practice. For example: What’s the approval process for the product and its marketing? Who owns the design of the products? How will revenue and costs be shared? What happens to unsold stock? Who is responsible if there is a product safety claim? And who is responsible for pursuing infringers?
Most collaborations will simply feature the parties’ individual trade marks separately on the product, often joined with the ubiquitous “x”. In those cases, it’s obvious who owns each trade mark. But what if the intention is to combine each party’s trade mark to create something new? Loewe x On did this for a sportswear capsule collection in 2024, adorning the range with a logo that merged their trade marks into a new monogram. Not only does this fly in the face of conventional wisdom around brand recognition, it also raises IP issues. The new logo should be registered as a trade mark, but who will own it? What happens to it at the end of the collaboration?
Brands often fear dilution, which is where the inappropriate use of a trade mark diminishes the reputation of a famous brand. In IP law, this can happen when an infringer uses a famous trade mark without permission, but marketing professionals know that the same effect can also occur when a company uses its own brand inconsistently or inappropriately. Collaborations present such a risk, especially for luxury brands, whose prestige could be tarnished by association with a more downmarket brand.
This is why some of the most successful collaborations are between luxury brands, ideally brands that share the same consumer demographic but offer different types of products. A good example is the limited edition Fendi x Tiffany & Co Baguette bag, which relaunched Fendi’s iconic handbag in Tiffany & Co’s signature duck-egg blue.
However, a luxury brand might want to cooperate with a brand that’s not so rarefied. For instance, in 2024 Louis Vuitton x Timberland boots appeared in a workwear capsule collection designed by Pharrell Williams. Louis Vuitton evidently felt that this was an opportunity to introduce its luxury craftsmanship to an expanded customer base.
Collaborations between two brands who are known for the same type of product are quite unusual. More often than not, it’s two companies who are well-known for vastly different products or services, such as the collaborations between Lush x Minecraft, or Nails Inc. x McDonald’s. Trade mark lawyers love this, because registered trade marks must specify the goods and services they protect. If your brand is active for a range of goods and services through a collaboration, you can legitimately protect and preserve the trade mark for that expanded range.
It is less common to see collaborations between brands who are known for essentially the same type of product. A notable example of this is the Omega x Swatch collaboration, as both brands are famous for watches. In fact, the collaboration deliberately draws on the product heritage of both watch brands. It centres on reproductions of Omega’s Speedmaster Professional watch (worn on NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon) fitted with quartz Swatch movements.
Omega x Swatch is, on the face of it, a double gamble, since both brands are owned by the same stable. Would the collaboration cannibalise the market for one or both brands? Would it dilute the Omega brand by producing a non-mechanical facsimile? Apparently not. Since the collaboration started in 2022, Omega x Swatch have produced 29 different “MoonSwatch” watches. They are highly prized by collectors and worn by celebrities such as Daniel Craig and Ed Sheeran.
If undertaken strategically, and supported by well-thought-through agreements, brand collaborations are a powerful tool that can lead to innovative products and benefits to both parties. Surely, it can’t be long before professional service firms also get in on the act. Howard Kennedy x Prada perhaps?
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