Small Essex café owner tells Harrods that they’ll continue to call themselves Hollands

The owner of a small café in Essex has vowed to carry on calling themselves Hollands, despite a heavyweight challenge by Harrods. Nigel Holland said he was ‘amazed’ when Harrods’ lawyers wrote to him recently to demand that he change the family-owned café’s name because customers may confuse it with the upmarket £1 billion Knightsbridge retail store. He said that at first he thought it was a wind-up, but it turned out to be a real battle on his hands. The letter said that he could face legal action if he did not change the name within one month. Although there is a similarity in the font used in the two signs, he claimed that there was no resemblance between the names or the services being offered and they merely used their own name. It remains to be seen what a court would decide if this ever gets that far, but in the meantime Hollands could not have hoped for better publicity if they had actually deliberately sought to free-ride off the back of Harrods’ reputation.