Revlon is suing several former employees over allegations that they “sabotaged” the company’s decades-old fragrance partnership with Britney Spears and took the business to a competitor.
In a case filed Monday (Aug. 26) in Manhattan federal court, attorneys for Revlon and subsidiary Elizabeth Arden claim that four ex-staffers stole trade secrets and breached their contracts when they jumped ship to upstart rival Give Back Beauty and took the Britney account with them.
Though an initial delay in Spears re-signing the 20-year perfume partnership deal was “attributed to Ms. Spears being preoccupied with other matters,” Revlon claims it eventually realized that its own executives had been orchestrating a corporate heist.
“Revlon and Elizabeth Arden were completely unaware that Revlon’s own team was actively sabotaging one of their most valuable licensing relationships,” the company’s lawyers claim.
The case does not name Spears as a defendant nor accuse her of any wrongdoing.
As defendants, the lawsuit names the four employees — Vanessa Kidd, Dominick Romeo, Reid Mulvihill and Ashley Fass — as well as Give Back Beauty itself. None of the defendants immediately returned messages seeking comment on the lawsuit’s allegations.
Then at the peak of her powers, Spears signed a deal with Elizabeth Arden in 2004 to develop branded fragrances and other cosmetics. When she released “Curious” later that year, it quickly became the top selling fragrance of the year and reportedly pulled in more than $100 million in sales.
According to a 2013 report by the Hollywood Reporter, “Curious” had sold more than 500 million bottles over its first decade, and the overall Spears-Arden partnership, featuring many other scents, was pulling in $30 million a year in sales.
According to the new lawsuit, Revlon had historically renewed its partnership with Britney in five-year intervals, and the latest iteration was set to expire at the end of 2024. When negotiations began late last year, the company says it had “every expectation that the relationship would continue.”
But according to the lawsuit, Give Back Beauty had launched a “campaign to obtain the Britney Brands fragrance business,” including contacting the Elizabeth Arden staffers as early as February: “This was obviously a carefully planned and executed grab by GBB for the Revlon fragrance business.”
Though Revlon says it struck a tentative deal with Britney’s team, the agreement had not been finalized in May, when staffers who had worked on the deal began “decamping to GBB.” Less than a month later, the lawsuit says, Give Back Beauty inked its own deal with Britney.
“The speed with which Britney Brands signed its deal with GBB was unprecedented for the Britney Brands organization and could not have been accomplished without the benefit of the Revlon employees’ deep knowledge of the misappropriated proprietary information about the relationship and GBB’s unlawful utilization of that information,” Revlon’s lawyers write.
The lawsuit takes particular aim at Kidd, a senior vice president for global marketing of fragrances who had spent years working on the Britney account and was allegedly the first to jump ship.
“At the same time that defendant Kidd was negotiating with Britney Brands on Revlon’s behalf, she had interviewed and accepted a job offer with GBB,” the company’s lawyers write. “Kidd effectively acted as a double-agent, assisting GBB in taking the Britney Brands business away from plaintiffs while she was charged with cementing an extension for Elizabeth Arden and purported to be doing so.”
The case claims that before she left, Kidd accessed more than 250 electronic files that contained proprietary information, including about the Britney partnership. Revlon says the “logical inference” is that she was “arming herself and her new employer” with info that could be used to “rapidly recreate the supply and distribution chains Elizabeth Arden had spent 20 years developing.”
In technical terms, the lawsuit accuses the ex-staffers and Give Back Beauty of theft of trade secrets and so-called tortious interference with their business and contracts. It also accuses the individual employees of breach of their contracts and breach of their duty of loyalty to Revlon.
In a statement to Billboard, Revlon stressed that the lawsuit did not accuse Spears or her team of wrongdoing and said “we value our 20-year partnership and wish Britney all the best.”
“As a company, we will always take steps to protect our intellectual property,” Revlon said in the statement. “We have filed this complaint because it became clear to us that GBB and the four former employees named in the suit unlawfully used Revlon’s proprietary information and trade secrets — and we are confident in the merits of our case.”
