The trademark a Brittany brewery never saw coming

Aurélien Picard runs a craft brewery in Bannalec, a town of 5,500 people in Finistère. The business is three people: Aurélien and two employees. They produce 50,000 to 80,000 bottles a year, delivered by van to bars, off-licences, and crêperies within a 40-kilometre radius. They have been doing this since 2017.

The brewery is called L'Imprimerie, named after the former print works it occupies. Every beer in the catalogue is a pun. There is Jean-Gol Potier, a tribute to the designer Jean Paul Gaultier. There is Mireille Mafieux, a smuggled brunette. There is Yvette Ornière, a gingery troublemaker. Each beer comes with a hand-drawn label of the character it riffs on. The names are jokes. The beers are real.

In 2021, Aurélien launched a blonde beer with ginger and lemon. He called it John Lemon. The label showed a caricature of John Lennon with lemon-slice glasses. Underneath were the words "Get Bock", a play on the German word for strong lager and the Beatles' 1969 single Get Back. The beer sold steadily for five years across the local network.

On 31 March 2026, Aurélien received a letter from a Dutch law firm. They were acting for The Imagine Peace Revocable Trust. The letter ordered him to stop selling John Lemon immediately, recall all stock from distribution, and confirm he would never again use the name or any visual reference to John Lennon. Failure to comply would trigger a €100,000 immediate fine, plus daily penalties of €150 to €1,000.

Aurélien thought it was a scam. He went online to check whether the law firm existed. It did. He searched for John Lemon trademark cases. He found that the Trust had pursued a similar action against a Polish lemonade company in 2017, and that the Polish company had lost.

The negotiation that followed gave him until 1 July 2026 to sell off remaining stock. He sold 5,000 bottles in the few days after the news broke. Picard told Le Télégramme: "It was sheer madness. People came from across Brittany for a souvenir." He has fewer than 1,000 bottles left.

He wanted to rename the beer Jaune Lemon. Jaune is French for yellow. The Dutch lawyers responded that Jaune was too close to John, and any visual reference to John Lennon was forbidden. He is now looking for a third name.

This is the story most coverage stops at. A small brewer caught by a celebrity trademark. A €100,000 fine. A bittersweet sell-off. The colourful detail about the lemon-slice glasses.

But the legal architecture behind the enforcement is more interesting than the headline. And it is the part that matters for any UK SME with a registered brand.

What the trademark register actually shows

We ran a search on John Lemon across the UK, EU, and US trademark registers. Twenty marks turned up. Eleven of them are active, registered, or pending. Nine are dead, withdrawn, or cancelled.

Three of the active marks are exact matches to John Lemon. Eight more are fuzzy near-misses, including six variants of John Lennon owned by the same registered proprietor.

That proprietor is The Imagine Peace Revocable Trust. It is named after the Imagine Peace Tower, the 2009 art installation by Yoko Ono in Reykjavík. The Trust holds Yoko Ono's IP portfolio relating to John Lennon's name, image, and associated marks. The Guardian and the French press refer to the enforcement as Yoko Ono's lawyers. That is colloquial. The legal proprietor is the Trust, and that distinction matters because every cease and desist letter, every opposition filing, and every invalidity action is brought by the Trust as a separate legal entity.

The Trust owns four registered JOHN LENNON marks across the EU and the UK. Two of them are operative in this case.

EU 018981406 (John Lennon, registered February 2024) covers eleven classes including Class 32 (non-alcoholic beverages) and Class 33 (alcoholic beverages). UK 00915712987 (JOHN LENNON, registered August 2016) covers Class 32, Class 33, and four others.

The Trust also owns EU 012073979 (JOHN LEMON), registered February 2014, covering Classes 11, 25, and 32. This is the registration directly named in the enforcement. It explicitly covers non-alcoholic beverages.

So when the Dutch lawyers ordered Aurélien to stop selling John Lemon, they had two layers of protection: the JOHN LEMON registration covering his exact product class, and the JOHN LENNON portfolio covering both Class 32 and Class 33 with the surname itself.

This is why his attempt to rename the beer Jaune Lemon was rejected. Jaune Lemon does not infringe the JOHN LEMON Class 32 registration. The visual element no longer reads as a lemon-glasses pun on Lennon. But the surname element still evokes John Lennon, and that brings the Class 32/33 JOHN LENNON registrations into play. The Trust's portfolio is structured so that creative renames hit a different mark in the portfolio. There is no obvious escape route.

The Polish case the Guardian referenced

In 2017, a Polish lemonade company called On Lemon used the brand John Lemon for its bottled drinks. The proprietor that enforced against them was the same Trust. The case settled with a rebrand to On Lemon and a stock sell-off period. UK 00003038134 (JOHN LEMON, filed January 2014 by The Licktators Limited, the company behind the Polish lemonade) is now recorded as dead on the UK register. The Licktators Limited is also a dissolved Companies House entity.

The pattern is now established. Whether 2017 or 2026, lemonade or craft beer, Polish or French, the outcome is the same. A small producer launches a product. The Trust's lawyers send a letter. The producer settles. Stock is sold off. The mark is abandoned.

What an SME would have learned from a five-minute search

Aurélien did not search the register before launching John Lemon in 2021. There is no formal requirement to do so. Many small brewers, food producers, and consumer goods companies skip the trademark search step because they assume conflict is unlikely, or because they do not know it is a step at all.

A search on the register at the time he launched would have shown the JOHN LEMON Class 32 registration owned by The Imagine Peace Revocable Trust, which had been on the EU register since February 2014. Seven years before Aurélien's launch. The UK JOHN LEMON registration (UK00912073979, the UK clone of the EU mark), also on the register since 2014. The JOHN LENNON Class 32/33 registration in the UK (UK00915712987), registered since August 2016. Five years before Aurélien's launch. And the Polish 2017 case as public news, easily searchable.

Aurélien did not need a lawyer to find any of this. He needed five minutes on the IPO register, or one click on a free trademark check service. The information was sitting in the public record, indexed, searchable, and clearly named.

Five minutes of upfront work would have shown him a five-year-old registered mark covering his exact product class, owned by an entity with an established enforcement track record. He would have chosen a different name in 2021. The brewery would have invested those five years of brand equity in something defensible. He would not be standing in his brewery in May 2026 with 1,000 bottles left and no name for his next batch.

The lesson is not "celebrity trademarks are dangerous"

That framing is wrong, and it lets small businesses off the hook in a way that does not serve them.

Celebrity trademarks are protected by the same Trade Marks Act 1994 as every other registered mark. The Imagine Peace Revocable Trust filed registrations, paid fees, designated classes, and renewed when required. The Trust is doing exactly what every brand owner is supposed to do: maintaining a registered estate and enforcing it consistently.

The lesson is that the public trademark register exists, and that a five-minute check before launching a brand catches conflicts that are otherwise invisible until a letter arrives. The cost of the check is approximately zero. The cost of the missed check, in Aurélien's case, is five years of marketing investment and a forced rename.

This applies whether the registered mark is owned by a celebrity estate, a multinational, a competitor, or someone you have never heard of. The mechanism is the same. The register is public. The search is fast. The information is available.

What we would do differently

We built TMGuard because this is the kind of conflict that should be caught before launch, not after a Dutch lawyer's letter arrives. The check you can run on tmguard.uk/check is free. It searches 21 million UK, EU, and US trademarks plus 9,191 structured UK opposition decisions. It returns results in under ten seconds.

If Aurélien had run it in 2021, he would have seen three exact matches for JOHN LEMON and six fuzzy matches for JOHN LENNON, with the JOHN LEMON Class 32 registration flagged as an active conflict. He would have chosen a different name. The beer would have been called something else from the start, and the brewery would have built five years of equity on a mark that was actually defensible.

The lesson for any UK SME with a registered brand is the same.

Run a check before you launch any new product, sub-brand, or marketing campaign that involves a new name. The cost is zero. The cost of the missed check is everything you have built so far.

Set up continuous monitoring on the brands you already own, so that the next John Lemon, the next conflict filed against a name you have invested years in, reaches you within 24 hours of the filing, not within six weeks of the enforcement letter. TMGuard monitoring starts at £99 a year for UK coverage. EU and US bundles are available.

Aurélien is now considering names for his next batch. The brewery itself continues. The lemon and ginger beer will live on under a new identity. The five years of brand equity behind John Lemon are gone, sold off as souvenirs to people who heard the story.

The trademark register is public, the searches are free, and the rules are the same for everyone. The cost of using them is materially less than the cost of not.