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HouseMARQUES March 2023: interview with Antony Douglass
The latest issue of the HouseMARQUES newsletter includes an interview with Antony Douglass of Specsavers, who took over as Chair of MARQUES last month.
You can read the interview in full in HouseMARQUES here.
Antony took up the position of Chair at the MARQUES Spring Meeting in Frankfurt on 2-3 March 2023, succeeding Joachim Hofmann of Syngenta. At the same time, Claudia Pappas of Thyssenkrupp became First Vice-Chair and Leo Longauer of LVMH Second Vice-Chair.
Antony’s priorities for his term include:
- Developing closer interaction between corporate MARQUES members and the MARQUES teams, building on the success of the corporate focus group.
- Deliver timely, relevant and topical content for members across various media channels, embedding the use of the project management tool to promote collaboration between teams.
- Foster the sustainability agenda with a new sustainability task force, providing guidance to members on the growing regulatory environment and looking at areas for improvement.
- Reintroduce MARQUES and reengage with key external stakeholders, including IP offices, other organisations, sister associations and the international trade mark community.
In the interview, Antony says: “Sustainability is an area of increasing scrutiny for regulators and the complexities of this for companies operating in an international context will be a growing burden. We’re starting to see regulators proactively investigate too, so this will also be an area of interest in terms of risk and compliance.”
He also identifies the complexities associated with Web3 domains, NFTs and operating in the metaverse as a growing area of interest for brands, as well as operating models in a post-Covid hybrid world and the current economic challenges.
“MARQUES is a treasure trove of experience, education, knowledge and people. For an in-house IP professional it combines much of what you’d need in terms of continuing professional education with great networking opportunities,” addsAntony.
At Specsavers, Antony is responsible for Group brand and marketing legal support, supporting the creative agency and advising on talent agreements and IPR licensing, as well as sponsorship and data protection. Specsavers has been a family-run business for nearly 40 years, working with store partners to provide the best value optometry and audiology services for customers. It employs more than 38,000 people across 2,300+ stores in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada and is based in Guernsey.
The latest edition of HouseMARQUES also includes updates from MARQUES Teams, news about an upcoming webinar on design case law, a summary of recent CJEU and General Court cases and news from EUIPO and WIPO.
Posted by: Blog Administrator @ 11.15
Tags: Antony Douglass, HouseMARQUES,



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