Rolex Orders Children’s Clock Maker To Undergo Rebrand

It looks like the world can’t be everyone’s oyster. Rolex, the luxury watchmaker distinguished for its waterproof automatic Oyster Perpetual range, is ticked off (no pun intended) by Oyster & Pop—a UK family-run business selling children’s learning products—and wants the latter to rebrand.

Rolex’s lawyers claim that a reasonable consumer would look at the Oyster & Pop logo and associate it with the Swiss company. They’ve asked the defendant to redesign its logo, as well as adopt a name and website domain change to avoid further litigation, the BBC reports.

The small business, founded in 2020, partnered with its teacher friends to design a learning clock with colorful numbers and hands that teach children to tell analog time. The wall decor is fairly affordable and is priced at about US$25 on Amazon.

Oyster & Pop’s co-founder sisters say it got its name from Oyster Bend—the road in Torbay, South Devon, that they grew up in. Beyond educational clocks, the brand has since expanded its lineup to include stationery, chore charts, and fraction learning sets.

Emma Ross-McNairn, who opened the independent company with her sister Sarah Davies, tells the BBC that Rolex’s letters to the firm have been “disappointing and aggressive.” 

Ross-McNairn argues that it’s unlikely anyone would believe the educational clocks are a product of the prominent timepiece maker. She adds that, if anything, they’ll probably think of the Oyster Card used on the metro, and not Rolex watches.

A massive overhaul would “crush our business,” Ross-McNairn laments. 

Rolex previously succeeded in blocking the sisters from applying a trademark in the clocks category in the US, where the watch brand owns the ‘oyster’ trademark. Unfortunately for Oyster & Pop’s owners, it was too expensive to engage attorneys to defend them in America at the time. As such, the case lapsed and Rolex USA won by default.

Though, Rolex hasn’t been triumphant in all disputes through the passage of time. Just Wednesday, it was dethroned from another pursuit in which it tried to trademark its crown logo with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), which argued that the company could take unfair advantage of its accumulated prestige to contest other uses of a crown, The Fashion Law reports. The EU General Court elaborated that it was unlikely consumers would relate crown-branded “clothing, footwear, [and] headgear” with Rolex.

Oyster & Pop has now responded to Rolex with a nine-page letter explaining why the family-run business thinks Rolex’s allegations are unfair.

Nevertheless, the owners have promised Rolex that they would never launch a watch for adults or change the firm’s name to simply Oyster.

[via BBC, Business Matters, The Fashion Law, images via various sources]