28^th April 2025

Dear Oliver,

My name is Kate Hawkins and I am the founder and creative director of CommonRoom. We are a small company that makes wallpapers and fabrics by artists, and the odd cushion here and there. It has come to my attention, that your much-larger company is selling goods with our Solstice design by Zoe Gibson, which we launched back in July of 2023.

Please see the comparisons below. It appears that you have used Zoe’s design as the basis for much of your spring/summer homeware collection.

Now, the things that trouble me about this are many, but I will try my best to summarise below…

CREDIT

Firstly credit. I trained as an artist at some of the best schools and as such, have a really solid grounding in art history. It was drummed into me right from the off that we have a moral duty to credit the work of others. This is a basic tenet of academia. Credit is not only a basic courtesy, it matters because it’s a sign of respect and recognition of someone’s hard work. Most importantly it’s an acknowledgement of value. The goods you are selling disregard Zoe’s, and in the process, our value. This is a serious problem. Plus from a business perspective, giving credit where credit’s due is surely good for brand value? In the crediting of others, your brand consequently becomes much more credible. 

INTEGRITY

This leads us to my second gripe: integrity. I know, as I’m sure you do, that no business is perfect and it’s impossible to be. I know that we’ve had our fair share of missteps and mistakes along the way. We can only try and do our best. That is the cornerstone of integrity and trust, which is in turn the cornerstone of good business. You know this. It’s even at the top of your code of conduct. We both know it only takes a few wrong turns to undermine that. I am asking you in good faith to please review your in-house design practices. According to other friends and contemporaries in the industry, this is not the first time this has happened. Integrity is about consistency of words and deeds. It’s meaningless to write about it at the top of your code of conduct if you don’t act on it.

LACK OF CREATIVITY

The lack of creativity here is the thing that shocks me the most. For a business that prides itself on ‘innovative, original designs’, and whose tag line is ‘designing our own take on fashion and homeware’, you have perhaps been very let down by your creative team or your suppliers? I’m not sure. But the close similarities between Zoe’s Solstice design and your pineapple print represent the antithesis of innovative and original work. Not to mention it’s very lazy. I strongly believe if we are making anything new, we have a responsibility to make that thing the best we can. There is already too much tat in an environmentally unstable world. I don’t mean perfect – perfectionism is often an enemy to authentic, free, self-expression. I mean honest. True creativity is wholehearted and requires you to bring all of yourself to it. It requires you to take risks and be scared by the process. It’s not cynical and it’s not derivative. Your pineapple print is both cynical and derivative. I think you can be better.

As such, I propose that you pay us a proper artist’s commission which we will share with Zoe. We pay our artists 10% (excluding VAT) of the sale price of products that use their designs. It’s above the industry standard but we prefer to do things fairly. I would ask that you do the same on all historical and future sales of products where you have freely used Zoe’s Solstice design. Because it’s not free, for Oliver Bonas or anyone else to use. 

I look forward to hearing from you,

Founder & Creative Director of CommonRoom

~ 

We first contacted Oliver Bonas on this matter by emailing the CEO, Oliver Tress, on the 16th of April. We received no response. 

On legal advice we then sent a 'right of reply' email to the PR department asking for them to look into the matter urgently. On the 24th April an Oliver Bonas spokesperson responded with this statement:

“I have been in informed that the print designer involved in creating this design is no longer with our team. As such, we need to investigate the origin and inspiration behind this print. We appreciate your patience as we look into this matter and will get back to you as soon as we have more information”.

We asked for clarification and serious engagement by the morning of the 28 April - having received none we have decided to make the matter public.

Link to Instagram post