Beauty manufacturer Seed Beauty has filed a lawsuit seeking to block Kim Kardashian’s beauty brand from leaking trade secrets.
Seed, the manufacturer for KKW Beauty, asked a California court to enjoin KKW Beauty from revealing secrets about its operations to Coty given that Coty is looking to acquire a majority stake in KKW, Seed said in court documents.
Seed said the company is unclear whether Kylie Jenner’s brand Kylie Beauty revealed company secrets to Coty before or after Coty acquired a 51 percent stake in the business for $600 million earlier this year.
“Seed Beauty has learned that Coty intends to acquire the KKW Beauty brand through purchasing an equity interest in KKW…the ‘collaboration’ reported in the press is actually a majority-stake investment in KKW,” the company said in court papers.
Seed said it is concerned that Coty would have asked for certain information during the deal process that would reveal Seed’s trade secrets.
Coty said in an SEC filing in June that it was in talks with KKW “regarding a possible collaboration with respect to certain beauty products” and that it wouldn’t comment further on the potential transaction unless it was required to do so. Coty chief executive officer Peter Harf said before that he was “good friends” with matriarch Kris Jenner and that the two had worked for a year and a half on the Kylie-Coty deal.