We’ve written about Buc-ee’s a couple of times recently, given the famed convenience store chain of the south’s aspirations to become the Monster Energy of convenience stores when it comes to nonsense trademark bullying. Buc-ee’s has gone after all kinds of other companies, almost always for the crime of having a cartoon animal in their logos. The company appears to think that it somehow has the exclusive right to such imagery, which is obviously bullshit. Buc-ee’s also appears to not have any concept of parody and parody’s protected status.

But I suppose if anyone is going to fight back against this sort of trademark bullying, it might as well be an underwear company called Nut Huggers. Jarrad Hewett, ownder of Nut Huggers Apparel, said he received a threat letter from Buc-ee’s over his company’s logo.

Hewett said he received the letter weeks after having his most profitable month of sales on record. His company focuses on underwear and apparel, using a patent to redesign the inside of its underwear to accommodate more active people. Hewett said he came up with his logo, which features a cartoon squirrel holding two acorns.

“We went with kind of tongue-in-cheek humor,” said Hewett.

After sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into his business and finally seeing it succeed, he said he was shocked to get the letter from Buc-ee’s.

Now, according to Hewett, Buc-ee’s made some very familiar claims that his company logo was trademark infringement for using a “cartoon character” with “buck teeth” and that the company must refrain from using such imagery as that, along with “cartoons, rodents, baseball hats, and the colors red, yellow, and brown. Hewett was also instructed to only use front-facing images.”

And that, dear friends, is complete and utter bullshit. Buc-ee’s has no standing to make those general demands. Its trademark affords it no monopoly on those generic types of images. And, to make it all the worse, even after Hewett wrote back agreeing to alter his logo to remove the specific colors Buc-ee’s objected to, Buc-ee’s refused to meet him half way and insisted he comply with every single demand it had made.

And, now, here are the logos in question.

Buc-ee’s:

And Nut Huggers Apparel:

Those are not similar. They’re not the same overall color scheme. They’re not the same animal. Both logos prominently feature the name of each business. They’re not in the same market categories in terms of products. And variations of the Nut Huggers logo aren’t really substantially closer to the Buc-ee’s logo.

And for those reasons, Hewett plans to fight.

“I think that it’s time that somebody stands up and says, this isn’t right. There’s no infringement here,” said Hewett. “You all don’t have the right to be doing this and take away people’s local livelihoods.”

I fear I may have no choice but to write much more about this in the future, if only because a trademark dispute between a nut-hugging squirrel and a beaver practically writes itself.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed