Case No. EWHC-941-(IPEC)

52.Having chosen the name Muzmatch, Mr Younas registered “muzmatch.com” as a domain in April 2011. This was followed in May 2011 by the launch of Muzmatch’s website followed, as mentioned above, by the launch of its app in March 2015. 53.In his evidence, Mr Younas dealt in detail with the evolution of the Muzmatch branding, tracing through the various signs it had used and the creative processes and thinking involved in them. Based on his evidence, Ms Bowhill’s Skeleton provided the following list of the logos used by Muzmatch and their dates of use: 54.I should make two points about this list;a.First, it omits some variants of the logo used by Muzmatch, such as the variants that appeared on the front and the back of the business cards mentioned above. These were the same as logo 2 above but without the letters “BETA” and, on the front, with the letters “.com” added in white text. b.Secondly, Match does not make any claim as regards the logos which do not include the word “muzmatch”. There is, therefore, no claim as regards logos 4, 5, 9, 15 and 16 shown above.55.The evidence shows that whilst operating from its website, Muzmatch’s business grew such that, by February 2015, it had 8,122 users in the UK and there had been some 1.5m page views of pages from its website. During this period, the Muzmatch name or logo was used not only on Muzmatch’s website but also in its marketing and promotional materials – being predominantly organic social media content, word of mouth, leaflets and, in particular, on the business card mentioned above which Mr Younas says was handed out at mosques and at Muslim events.56.After the switch to the app in March 2015, Muzmatch appears to have grown more rapidly. Whilst it had had 7,824 signups in the UK in March 2016, generating some 25.8m online swipes, by September 2021, those figures had grown to 666,069 signups and an average of 71m swipes a month. In this period, the name was used not only on the app itself but also in organic and (largely after 2017) in paid-for social media content promoting the app. These included two advertisements featuring a play on the words from well-known songs by Lionel Ritchie “Halal! Is it me you’re looking for” (which reached over 100,000 people in the UK in February 2018) and Adele “Halal from the other side!”. The same advertisements also appeared on the London Underground and on public buses in London and Manchester. Mr Younas also gave evidence of television advertisements since 2018 on the Islam Channel and Sky TV and, from there, on Muzmatch’s YouTube page.