Fashion Nova Beats Fast-Fashion Rival Honey Bum’s Antitrust Suit

Fast-fashion retailer Fashion Nova Inc. shook off claims Wednesday that it organized an unlawful group boycott by threatening to stop purchasing from certain clothing vendors unless they stopped selling to its competitor Honey Bum LLC.

Honey Bum’s antitrust claims fail because it didn’t show there was a horizontal agreement between the vendors themselves to boycott Honey Bum, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in an opinion by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.

Honey Bum asserted a per se group boycott, where competitors enter into a horizontal agreement to boycott a firm and the boycott’s initiator had ...