Wasabi Frog Limited, the company which owns the online fashion retailer boohoo.com, and the owner of Community Trade Mark Registrations for "Boohoo", "Boohoo.com" and "Boo", has recently obtained an interim injunction to prevent Miss Boo Limited, which set up in direct competition, trading under the trade mark and domain name "Miss Boo".
Wasabi has traded under the names "boohoo" and "boohoo.com" since November 2006 via their internet site at www.boohoo.com, as a retailer of women's clothing, shoes and accessories, aimed primarily at women aged between 17 to 25 years old. Miss Boo launched an online retail business selling products in direct competition with Wasabi in September 2009, albeit aimed at a slightly older female audience. In granting the injunction, the High Court ruled that there was an arguable case in passing off and trade mark infringement.
Wasabi was able to establish that it had developed a reputation in its brand "boohoo" through use since 2006. Wasabi also contended that the strength of the "boohoo" brand was shown by the fact that ASOS (the UK's largest online-only fashion and beauty store) was bidding on the "boohoo" key word on Microsoft's search engine, in order to be associated with the "boohoo" brand.
The case also referred to an interesting use of Google AdWords as providing evidence of confusion. Wasabi was able to show that use of the words "Miss Boo" as a Google Adword resulted in a "click-through" rate of visitors to the www.boohoo.com website of 14.89% - the fourth largest source of traffic to the "boohoo.com" website. This illustrated that customers searching for the "boohoo.com" website were often searching against the term "Miss Boo" and were mistakenly entering the term "Miss Boo" believing that this would take them to the "Boo Hoo" website
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