Life on Easy Street

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Law drives business at easygroup, says newly installed managing director Anthony Robb-John to Edward Fennell

The easyGroup has grown big by making life easy for its customers. It has earned founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou (who now prefers to be known as plain Stelios) both a fortune and a knighthood. But it has also contributed a new chapter in the history of branding and IP due to the simple genius of its name which has come to represent a whole way of life as well as a means of doing business.

With its origins in the ground-breaking easyJet airline, the easyGroup now owns the brands of 17 separate operations – stretching from men’s personal grooming easy4men through to easyCruise – which make up the easy family. Nurturing that family, protecting it and seeing off the multitude of threats it faces is now the responsibility of Anthony Robb-John, the managing director of easyGroup IP.

Appointed to run the business at the end of last year, Robb-John says that his mission is to ‘extract value from the IP’ within easyGroup. The challenge is perfect for his skill set. As a lawyer-turned- entrepreneur Robb-John, now in his early 40s, can combine his well-honed legal skills with a lifelong fascination with business and management.

‘My parents owned their own business so it’s in the blood,’ he says. Hence his twintrack career (see p36 for details) which has seen him qualifying as a solicitor and then alternating between working in practice and then going in-house for a mix of legal and business roles – while also picking up an MBA en route. This culminated in being appointed head of commercial and legal at monstermob Group before joining easyGroup in December. ‘I think that in Britain too many lawyers box themselves into a narrow specialism and are too modest about their abilities,’ he says. ‘my view is that many lawyers are capable of more than this. In America, by contrast, there is much more fluidity about career progression. Lawyers there have wider horizons. I go along with that approach.’

Arriving at easyGroup was like a dream come true for Robb-John. It was the chance to combine his leading-edge IP skills with one of the most extraordinarily ambitious and dynamic businesses in the country. ‘I have worked for several entrepreneurs in my career but Stelios is unique,’ explains Robb-John. ‘His energy is simply on a different level from most other people. He is entirely without pretentiousness and is entirely straight-talking. But his mind is on the business round the clock. For example, it was written into my contract that I should be constantly accessible by Blackberry and it’s quite usual to get a message from him about a new idea at 10 at night. But I get a real buzz from doing the deals and I enjoy the complexity of it all and the amazing speed with which we work.’

Managing the easy brand
Currently Stelios’s goal is to launch a new business every 10 weeks. Such a growth spate sounds astonishing but it is all part of the ground-breaking entrepreneurial style that Stelios has come to embody. Having worked patiently for years laying the foundations to create easyJet (and the accompanying easy philosophy) he is now keen to drive forward as rapidly as possible to expand the easy empire. There is now a relentless appetite for new products and services which embody the easy brand values and which can either be developed by Stelios himself or to which he can license the easy brand.

I have worked for several entrepreneurs in my career but Stelios is unique. His energy is simply on a different level from most other people. He is entirely without pretentiousness and is entirely straight-talking. But his mind is on the business round the clock.

Yet underpinning what might seem a freewheeling, open approach is a hard-line determination to control strictly how the brand is used, to enforce ownership and to ensure that agreements are kept. And despite the emphasis on simplicity the level of specification contained in the company’s brand manual ‘for the benefit of franchisees, licensees and potential business partners’ (downloadable from the www.easy.com website) is staggering in its level of detail. Yet it is symptomatic of the extent to which easyGroup is resolute about what it represents and what it will protect.

‘The easyGroup now owns well over 700 trademarks globally and defending them is a massive job,’ explains Robb-John. ‘I basically manage all the in-house legal work and cover everything from tax to litigation. But the foundation of my job is the IP law which I learned when I trained at Wragge & Co. The context may have changed but the fundamentals remain the same.’

Because of the power of the ‘easy’ brand it has been a target for rip-offs and lookalikes from an early stage. As the company comments on its website, ‘Some people think they can make a fast buck by stealing our name and our reputation. They set up websites and companies using the name ‘easy’ (or phonetic versions of it) which can either pay a passing resemblance to an easyGroup company or be a direct copy. Sometimes these people ask us for money, sometimes they just hope consumers will think they are an easyGroup company and will part with their money.’

Although it has been an ongoing problem the company now has a substantial track record of landmark victories in the courts as proof that it will fight almost anyone, anywhere to protect its IP. As Robb-John explains, some of those who try to abuse the easy brand are just trying it on but there are others who are downright fraudulent (such as the eeasybrokers website which, as recently as last autumn, was pretending to be part of the easyGroup and was taking money from customers while pretending that they were providing car insurance).

Making a difference
Thanks to this the world at large is starting to realise that easyGroup is not a pushover. Nonetheless the battle goes on relentlessly. Anthony Robb-John himself usually sends off a warning letter when infringements are first detected and in 90% of cases, he says, that does the trick. However, where it starts to get serious he tends to instruct counsel himself.

‘I’m tremendously impressed by the English Bar, it’s an enormous asset,’ he says. ‘The level of responsiveness amongst barristers and their commitment, in my experience, is extremely good. I think the Bar has really moved on a long way in recent years.’

However, when it comes to firms of solicitors Robb John is rather less enthusiastic. He has a favoured few in the UK and a select group which he uses across the world, but he comments: ‘Many law firms find it very hard to understand how the easyGroup operates and what makes us tick. Besides their overheads are very high and our emphasis always is to look for value for money!’

‘Value for money’, ‘For the many not the few’ and ‘Making a difference in people’s lives’ are some of easyGroup’s brand values – so is ‘Taking on the big boys’. And that is a challenge that Anthony Robb-John views with relish.

Anthony Robb-John CV in brief:

1987-1988 Trainee solicitor, Wragge & Co
1988-1992 Solicitor, Richards Butler
1992-1995 Director, business and legal affairs, Celador productions
1995-1997 Full-time MBA
1998-1999 Managing director (family business)
1999-2002 Vice-president, Two Way TV
2003-2006 Senior associate, Cobbetts
2006 Head of commercial and legal, Monstermob Group PLC
2006 Managing director, easyGroup

This article first appeared in IP Review, issue 18

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