If you’re setting up a brand to sell online for the first time, or expanding your fashion website to target different customers, there are a number of legal issues you need to consider. Learn about website building keeping all the legal policies in mind.

Following on from last week’s Building A Website – The Legal Steps, Part 1, where Tahir Basheer offered advice on finding a domain name, your website content and data, this week he concludes the two part-series.

There are legal considerations to make while website building for your brand, especially a transactional one. Here I look at the terms and conditions for websites, social media and e-commerce, as well as mobile content and VAT.

Website Visitors

The terms and conditions of your website building are effectively the contract you hold with the visitors to your site. In this way, the terms and conditions are extremely important. Many people use generic website terms and conditions and therefore miss crucial aspects of their busi...

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With the surge of the Internet and the increasing popularity of Western fashion trends in Eastern territories and vice versa, the business of international fashion agents and distributors is on the rise. Let's explore about Fashion agents.

Tahir Basheer, an industry member specialising in fashion and media law for leading London-based law firm, Sheridans, offers expert legal advice on using fashion agents to sell your products.

Keeping up with this international demand can be very tricky for fashion designers and brands who already struggle to keep up with local business. It is for this reason that designers and brands are increasingly appointing fashion agents to sell their products in foreign territories on their behalf.

Using fashion agents internationally should give the designer and the brand, an element of control over how their products are marketed and sold. However, the appointment of agents is heavily re...

Hiring an Ad agency can be a tedious task if you are unaware of their whereabouts or working process. Our legal expert from Fashion Insiders gives us the best tips on how to hire an ad agency.

Tahir Basheer from Sheridan's law firm offers his advice on considerations to be made before hiring an ad agency.

In order to increase brand awareness and drive sales, you may engage with an advertising agency to provide services for your fashion business. These services range from a full-blown campaign to specific online advertisements. As the fashion industry tends to be image orientated, high impact advertising is incredibly important.

Here are my top tips of things to be aware of when hiring an ad agency.

Ownership

A fashion brand, as much as possible, should ensure that they own all the rights in the work produced and services rendered by the agency, which includes owning the intellectual property (IP) that makes up the advertising campaign. The ideal position for the brand should be th...

Most manufacturers include a number of care labels on their clothes to tell consumers that the garments meet certain standards. Let's understand what instructions must go into Care Labels.

These labels include the washing instructions (care labels) you see when you read that your lovely new knitwear, after it has emerged from the washing shrivelled and discoloured, should have actually only been hand washed at precisely 24.7 degrees by a Benedictine Monk before being dried slowly over a naked flame and beaten by a club.

What you might not know is that these logos are actually a type of trademark called "Certification Marks." These marks provide a guarantee that the goods or services bearing the mark meet a certain defined standard or possess a particular characteristic.

The owner of the mark will generally define what that standard or characteristic is. But as these marks are owned by other people, you will often have to pay for the privilege to use them. Generally, this is done by ...

The advantages and disadvantages of franchising are many. A franchise is a major decision for a business to make.

Tahir Basheer of Sheridan's law firm outlines the main advantages and disadvantages of franchising as a business model from the perspective of the brand owner.

A company franchising their business (the 'franchisor'), in essence, provides another party (the 'franchise'), with all the building blocks required to create a successful business.

For example, they will provide the brand: the trademarks, designs and marketing materials as well as project management, buying and operational support. The franchise uses those building blocks in exchange for the risk in the business: they rent the premises, pay their staff and so on.

Franchises are often found in the food industry, such as big brands like KFC. But the franchise model can also extend into the fashion industry. A good example of a successful franchise is Tommy Hilfiger – a third of their 1,000 stores are run by franch...

To become a franchisee, one must come to a franchise agreement with the franchisor, often paying a lump sum up front and incurring a number of liabilities. It is not a decision to be taken lightly. Here I discuss some of the key pros and cons:

Advantages of franchising from a franchisee perspective

Accessibility and support

Franchisees will benefit from the contacts and expertise of the franchisor and be assisted with site selection, lease negotiation, site development etc. and be provided with formal training programmes and operating systems. Franchisees will also benefit from the ongoing research and development carried out by the franchisor.

Reduction of risk

Successful franchises will have a proven track record, so franchisees can be confident that the main problems with the business will have been addressed. Therefore, subject to effective input, the risk of business failure will be significantly reduced. This is reflected in the fact that far fewer franchisees fail within th...

Brand Policing is a necessity to protect your intellectual property, not just a suggestion.

Tahir Basheer of law firm Sheridans uses an example of a trademark infringement case to explain why brand owners should have a brand enforcement strategy in place.

Many brand owners think of intellectual property rights infringement as two separate problems:

1. Stopping major infringements, including copying by competitors; and
2. General brand policing (including online marketplaces and smaller scale infringements) which aims to maintain consistency with brand image.

They rightly consider problem #1 as a vital strategic move for their brand, which they are willing, if needed, to divert considerable resources to.

However, problem #2 is considered by many brand owners as a "nice thing to have." You might think that only big brands like Nike or those in the LVMH group undertake these kinds of activities. Aside from the obvious benefits: recouping lost profits and sustaining brand image, there ...

Anti Copying In Design ("ACID") is a trade organisation set up by designers for designers and manufacturers, to help them protect their intellectual property.

We spoke to Dids Macdonald, CEO of ACID, to find out how fashion designers can benefit from the work that they do.

Tell us about the work that ACID does

ACID has over 1,000 member companies who individually also employ thousands of designers in 25 different sectors.

We have a lobbying and campaigning arm which raises awareness about design’s significance to the UK economy, not only for its members but for designers in general. ACID also belongs to the Alliance for Intellectual Property, and designers were the biggest contributor to its pre-election manifesto driven by ACID. Research told us that Intellectual Property (IP) is very important to their growth, developments in technology offer significant growth opportunities, and that a stable legal framework is important to their business.

However, the research indicated that:

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced that it had opened an investigation into suspected ‘anti-competitive arrangements’ in the UK clothing, footwear and fashion sectors. Tahir Basheer, a lawyer specialising in fashion and media law for leading London-based law firm Sheridans, explains what that means for you.

They say that some of the arrangements in these sectors could infringe competition law and you’re probably thinking: “What is an anti-competitive arrangement and do I need to worry about this investigation?”

Well, the good news is that this investigation is only at a preliminary stage and there have been no findings of any unlawful behaviour yet. But the investigation is a timely reminder for fashion businesses to review and evaluate their current arrangements, especially if they have a sizable market share.

When people think of anti-competitive behaviour they think of cynical monopolies or criminal cartels. While these are a target of competition law, the law i...

I am a young twenty-something who has always been passionate about three things: fashion, beauty and business! I currently work in PR which I am thoroughly enjoying as there is always variety to my day. But, 2014 was the year I decided to take the leap into entrepreneurship and launch an idea I was stalling on… Chaela Rose beachwear.

There are so many things that you prepare yourself for when launching your fashion business, but no matter how ready you think you are, receiving a letter from a large well-known brand that could harm your business, and threatening an intellectual property battle, would shock anyone. So what happens when a fashion start-up is told that the unique name created for their brand, is an infringement on a big brand's trademark? It happened to Michaela Anderson last year, and she shared her journey with us to inform others.

I love going on holidays, whether it’s a girls' holiday to Cancun or a family holiday to Greece. I also enjoy pre-holiday shopping and g...