You know what I realised a while back? Because I'm no longer trading, due to illness, I can tell you all the inadvisable behind-the-scenes nonsense now! I was totally repressing myself earlier.
I thought I'd start with the only time I can recall going from zero-to-lawyer - and if you enjoy it I'll see how many other bits of aged legal bobbins I can let you in on.
I'll try and make the background as brief as possible, so I'm papering over a lot of nuance here, sorry to the lawyers amongst you :)
In the UK, there are two forms of law, criminal and civil (or 'tort') law. Many actions can fall under both, but criminal law is handled by state authorities seeking prosecution and punishment for crimes that are deemed to affect society as a whole, whilst civil/tort law is pursued on an individual case where a person or persons claims damages from another.
It's also worth noting that here, businesses legally count as persons - which is why anyone asking me for a nude on social media got a copy of the legal incorporation document. Or sometimes my trademark. If you want to run a business, it helps to learn a little tort law, and also develop a strategy for unwanted comms!
In all cases it is considered advisable and in many cases legally required to KEEP YOUR HECKIN MOUTH SHUT about any of your legal altercations.
The UK system is largely adversarial (though the family courts are desperately trying to move away from this), so just from a practical perspective, we're all best off keeping our legal issues quiet anyway. And that's why I've rarely spoken publicly about any of it! Meanwhile in the background, there's been a steady trickle of negotiations, typically about;
- copyright infringement (imagery, products, prints, text, logos, all sorts of things!)
- trademark infringement (not all businesses have a full legally recorded trademark, but you also don't always need one in the uk)
- 'passing off'
- breach of contract
- payment delays
- debt negotiation
- dmca (technically this is usa law but it gets used all the time anyway)
The UK system heavily encourages resolving all issues without getting in front of a judge, so in about 20 years of small business shenanigans, only one of these ever made it to a court. I did throw a lawyer at people a few times though. If you're ever likely to start a brand, I can heartily recommend randomly doing a bit of law at undergraduate degree, and making a friend there who ends up as your solicitor* ;)
Way back in 2007 (illustrated above courtesy of the Wayback Machine and, of course, Morgana) at the very start of the business**, I almost exclusively sold to other businesses, and the online shop got requests from stockists. Once approved, they could login and order. Fairly early on I had an account, let's call him Bob, and his website . . . let's call it "Bob's Nylons'n'fings". It was one of a bunch of small websites at the time catering to people who really, really liked stockings. I'd actually met Bob in person - we used to trundle round a whole series of events for an assortment of people who had "like" to "er, maybe this is a paraphilia?" levels of stockings joy, and he'd been doing the rounds as well.
From 2007 to 2012, we traded with an occasional quibble, but nothing serious. I was never doing quite what was ideal for Bob. He wanted a steady supply of basic suspender belts that they could order in tiny quantities, whilst I was focussed on limited edition full sets. We had the odd discussion about it, I let the occasional very small order go through (small orders aren't profitable at business-to-business prices), and things seemed to trundle along.
Above; Bob's website back in the day. Folks, 2007 was a very different time in online retail!
And then, in Spring 2012, I got a message from a customer asking about a suspender belt they'd bought that purported to be Kiss Me Deadly, but didn't seem quite right. The fabric seemed like poor quality, they said. After some discussion, I bought the suspender belt from her, and sent her our actual one. Because yes, in spite of the photo, the text, the label on the wrapping and everything else saying Kiss Me Deadly, Bob's Nylons'n'fings had sent her someone else's white 6-strap suspender belt instead.
But that's just one, right, could be a mixup?
Except when I looked at the Nylons'n'fings website, I could see that the colour, size and stock amounts of the suspender belts in no way matched up to what had been bought from us. I subsequently had about 6 different people buy a number of the garments - I have very co-operative friends! If memory serves, only about 15% of them turned out to be Kiss Me Deadly.
(For garment nerds; the other suspender belts were very similar, there's only so many ways you can do a deep retro garter belt, after all. But they were a very cheap shiny lycra jersey that pulls easily, the stuff you can buy for 1.99 a metre or less for dancewear. We'd started using Carvico at heading on for 5 a metre, minimum order one huge roll! Also the fabric was ruched over the waistband instead of the waistband lying on top. The available sizes and colours weren't the same - I never did get the hang of white - and of course all our labelling was missing)
After collecting the original purchase emails and packaging plus screenshots and so on, I had a neat pile of evidence that Bob was buying from another, cheaper UK supplier, then putting printed-out labels that said "Kiss Me Deadly" onto their plastic bags, and listing them online with our imagery and brand materials to sell as Kiss Me Deadly. At a significantly higher price than the other brands usually retailed at, by the way.
So this is pretty clearly intentional counterfeit; selling a fake. It's not the worst case of that - there are some items sold that are not just slightly subpar quality but fully dangerous to users. It's very unusual for your own stockist to do it though! You can imagine it came as quite the shock for me to have had a sociable trading relationship with someone for 5 years and then to find that their solution to my not having the stock they want isn't for them to negotiate, but to simply substitute lower quality goods, sold using my label.
As well as people noticing the quality was off, damaging my brand, Bob was profiting from my marketing and reputation for quality, using them to charge higher prices - without paying me a penny.
And so for once, I went from zero-to-lawyer in a matter of days. A solicitors letter was sent. A reportedly VERY strange phonecall followed. Subsequently I got a reply from their local solicitor, who . . . couldn't spell counterfeiting. Yes, the letter was rife with spelling errors and a description of Bob's emotional distress - not typically what you expect in UK legal matters! It claimed that the "counter-fitting" was a big mistake when some suspender belts fell off a shelf and mysteriously jumped into mislabelled packets and listed themselves online. Apparently Bob was in tears about the matter.
My solicitor-friend read this over the phone to me, presumably because lawyers have to get their giggles somehow. If memory serves my initial reaction was about 47 swears in a row.
Obviously I didn't believe a word of it. Legally it's still counterfeiting even if it's a mixup, so we reiterated our main points. If you are counterfeited, you're allowed to take back all your stock, even when it had been paid for, so that's what we'd gone for.
But they just kept on denying it, so we had to discuss the options. You might assume those would be "take expensive and slow legal action, or give up". Either of these is awkward, given that if you don't protect your IP here, it can weaken you in future cases. But you'd be wrong!
See, in the UK, there exists a statutory body called Trading Standards. As an individual, you'll probably never deal with them. They aren't there to mediate individual disputes, but to enforce trading laws overall. They spend most of their time doing deadly serious and extremely boring things, like removing explosive vapes and lead-painted children toys, so if you contact them about lingerie . . . they might find it entertaining enough to act. And indeed they did! I have no idea if they would these days, they're a lot harder to get hold of and like all things in austerity-UK, they've had staffing levels cut. They have the power to seize counterfeit goods - and a robust sense of humour if those goods are fancy undies.
So they popped over to grab KMD trademarked items and disappear them forever, only to discover that Bob, Bob's Nylons'n'things, and all the stock had vanished. TO FREAKING AUSTRALIA.
So that's what the lies were about, they were just delaying tactics in a move that must have been planned for a while!
Now it's the end, right?
No! Look, I'm not the worlds most creative design person, but I am pretty inspired and stubborn when I'm annoyed, and I'm not a nice person. So whenever I had a spare bit of energy for the next few years, I would track down whatever Kiss Me Deadly Bob was selling online, and use whatever Intellectual Property reporting was available to throw spanners into the works. I will note that I could only do that because Bob was fool enough to continue using the trademarked brand name and imagery, things it's very easy to prove I own.
I also changed the pattern of all our suspender belts to the one we'd originally used for the Alouette (seen above in green). You can't see the difference much on the single-colour suspenders, and it's fiddlier for the factory to sew, but it immediately distinguishes Kiss Me Deadly from everything else out there, and from when we provide them white-label or private-label to other brands. As you can see our most basic product imagery also changed with time, as it became a lot easier for me to just wang things on a mannequin and get it cut-out. That wasn't at all standard in way back in 2007! On the mannequin is the original black 6 strap, and in the cut-out is the different pattern in contrasting peach silk and black.
After some prompting from the work-best-friend-boss at Playful Promises I started explicitly naming our fabric, since it's a major distinguishing feature and makes the garments last longer.
So now we're done, right? right?!
In 2018, I was handed a request for a new wholesale account from a lady with a mildly unusual first name. My first response wasn't enthusiastic, as they'd shown us a website that included Kiss Me Deadly images in spite of having not actually bought anything.
A couple of days and a conversation about that later, something in my brain fired up; I searched the archive for her name and . . . oh look! It's the business-and-life-partner of Bob! Now claiming to have been separated for many years . . . but still on record at Companies House*** as his secretary in their mutual operations.
People, I can't even.
At the time of writing in 2025, Bob is still on the register at Companies House with a couple of companies, though he seems to have finally figured out that online retail maybe wasn't his best life. Ms Bob is still his companies registered secretary, and they seem to have married in 2023. I wish them much joy in their new, retro-stockings-retail-free life.
NOW it's the end. I hope you found some of this either useful or entertaining and if you want more behind-the-stockings content, let me know! I'm not fit to be organising making products again, but I can do this.
And if YOU like the Kiss Me Deadly brand so much you want to label things with it, come and chat, because I'm happy to sell or license it, and tell you all about how much more of a nightmare dealing with Carvico has gotten post-Brexit :)
* for overseas readers; a solicitor is the allen/hex key of lawyering in the UK. You go and consult a solicitor for everything civil - will, buying a house, divorce, all sorts - and you need one for criminal issues too. They often have specialist areas. If you're doing something VERY complicated and need to be advocated for in court then you might need a barrister, and those are much rarer, way more specialised and way more expensive.
** yeah I'm really old, especially because fashion years are like dog years
*** Companies House is a huge statutory organisation in the UK that keeps extensive records on business entities and their people here. It's searchable online and anyone in business has probably been on it at 3am whilst mildly demented about something! You used to have to have a registered director and a registered secretary for every company; its changed in recent years, but a lot of us never updated.
