licensing – The Fashion Industry Law Blog

In our explorations of representations and warranties that are typical to contracts in the fashion business, we now come to one of the classics: the warranty that, by signing the contract, the party is not violating any other contracts it has signed. A typical such warranty would look like this:

Fashion Company represents and warrants that, by entering in to this agreement, it shall not violate the terms and conditions of any other agreement, arrangement or understanding to which Fashion Company or any of its affiliates is a party.

What is that about? Remember Mel Brooks’ The Producers (in any of its forms as movie, Broadway musical or movie of the Broadway musical)? The hero (loosely speaking) was Max Bialystock, a down-on-his luck Broadway producer who, with his accountant partner, tried to make a killing by selling far more than one hundred percent equity investment interests in his musical Springtime for Hitler. All he had to do to make the scheme work was to be sure that the show failed—which would not prove as easy as it first appeared.

If someone contractually sells interests in anything to different people so that they collectively have rights to more than all of what could have been sold, the seller has certainly made agreements that violate the terms and conditions of each of the sale agreements, resulting in a breach of this important warranty each time—if the seller was foolish enough to compound his problems by making such a warranty. Another all-to-common example: any Ponzi scheme or similar scam.

Surely, one of the most important places in the fashion business for such a clause is in a license agreement. The licensee needs to be very sure that the grant that it has received is valid and does not conflict with any grant made by the licensor to any other licensee; and the licensor needs to be equally certain that it is not granting conflicting rights to different persons. For example, if you are about to sign as the exclusive licensee for a brand in the “sportswear” category, would you feel that a license to another party for “activewear” violates your exclusivity? The answer, on those possible facts alone, is a resounding “maybe.” If you define sportswear broadly enough, even redundantly enough, to include, “all casual, active and athletic wear,” any license granted by the licensor to a third party for activewear would violate the warranty made to you for sportswear—and you would therefore have the basis of a claim and, if necessary, a lawsuit.

Here again, doing your diligence on your counterparty—and defining your terms—will go a long way toward making your contract into the protective blanket that you and your attorneys intended it to be.

Credit: Alan Behr

See previously published related posts:

“I Promise, Therefore I Am“
“No Guarantees In Life But Plenty in Contracts“

It can be said that a licensing arrangement is inherently symbiotic in nature, with the good faith efforts and cooperation of both the licensor and the licensee being necessary for success. The licensor provides its trademark, perhaps some degree of design expertise (particularly in the fashion field), and perhaps also brand customer relations and certain advertising and promotional assistance; and the licensee contributes its expertise in the particular industry covered by the license and possibly its customer relations, its organizational structure and capital resources. The resulting relationship, in a very practical sense, is that of a joint venture or a partnership. Although on one level the negotiation and drafting of a license agreement must be approached as an adversarial process, both parties also should recognize that they will be more likely to view their arrangement ultimately as a success if it strikes a balance, on the one hand, between the licensor’s legitimate concerns for the maintenance of its image and quality standards, for the protection of its trademark and for fair compensation for the rights it has granted and, on the other hand, the licensee’s legitimate desire to exploit the rights granted to it in an economically advantageous manner consistent with industry norms in the applicable market segments and without fear of termination if it is performing in good faith. Ideally, therefore, the parties should approach the negotiation and documentation of the license agreement from the perspective that each of them is looking to make the venture a success for both of them and should recognize and attempt to satisfy the other’s needs.

That said, no matter how much the parties aim for “fairness,” there almost surely will be provisions that a licensor perceives as necessary to protect important interests which a licensee considers unfair, unduly burdensome or overreaching. Before proceeding with an agreement, a licensee must remember that words have meaning and a licensor can seek to force the licensee to conform in its performance to what the agreement says. A licensee cannot rely on its business sense (or gut) to assume that a licensor would “never do that,” even if the licensor assures it that the licensor never has done so before. There also can be no great comfort in the thought that the provision might not be enforceable, since the time and cost involved in adjudicating the issue can be enormous, even if the licensee succeeds. If the agreement requires certain conduct or prohibits certain acts, a licensee should assume that those words control and that, if it ignores them and its licensor’s demands for conformance, it does so at its peril.

Credit: Jonathan R. Tillem