I will admit, I just like their goat sticker and have never ordered from them, but I find this slightly absurd.
backcountry.com a year ago filed for trademarks protecting the word “backcountry”
The entities they’re going after include a women’s outdoor recreation organization called Backcountry Babes and a snowmobile club in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
They are going after everyone. If you dig deep there is three pages of lawsuits they have filed including one going after a non profit outdoor youth club that uses the term, back country. They defend the practice as protecting their brand. The other argument is they are using the trademark of backcountry to wipe out competitors. Alarmingly, they seem to be winning too.
Trademark law is a very complicated legal field.
But Backcountry is not going after everyone ... they're going after anyone they can intimidate and outspend in court. It has a bad look to it, and this PR may cause them to back off a bit. But ultimately, it's a normal practice for businesses to engage in to develop and protect their brands.
I'm not sure what my spirit animal is, but I'm confident it has rabies.
In times past businesses doing this to the smaller or perceived competition could succeed or not cuz their mission statement was flawed. Kinda like Backcountry. But now we have the all powerful social media and bad PR can result in good boycotting. They're going after other biz wallets and soon it may be the other way around.
Trademarking is very much specific to use of the term or logo so it really only makes sense that it would only involve commercial products and services-- not something like an NPS backcountry office.
Especially with Backcountry releasing more and more of their own products, it only makes sense that they would do this-- how else do you protect your brand and its reputation? This is just how capitalism works and is by far the least of its travesties.
@Tough_Boots
The issue is that Backcountry is expanding its core business into new markets that infringe on existing trademarks in those market segments.
This happened with Apple Computer who spent 30 years litigating infringement with Apple Corps (the record company started by the Beatles in the 1960s). The computer company had exponentially more money to spend than the record company, and it took years before they had settled all their disputes and paid and purchased for all the copyrights. (feeling bored? read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Cor ... e_Computer)
Backcountry.com can issue "Cease and Desist" orders to all these other smaller companies, but hopefully the little guys in a market that the goat is now moving into have enough resources to fight and get the payout they deserve.
I'm not sure what my spirit animal is, but I'm confident it has rabies.
The bike company Specialized did this about 5 years back. I think it was a word associated with a popular bike model. The backlash they received from the cycling community for nearly putting several small bike shops out of business because of the word in their name is legendary and damaged their brand reputation significantly.
I just noticed that they've also applied to trademark "gearhead" because that's the name they refer to their CSRs by. It's also a pretty generic term that is used by other outdoors-related companies. I wonder how that will go.
I'm not sure what my spirit animal is, but I'm confident it has rabies.
Backcountrygear.com - i would have thought those guys were in the crosshairs, as it seems very easy to confuse the two retailers. i think BCG might put up a better fight.
Since its founding in 1996 by two ski bums, Jim Holland and John Bresee, who died in June, Backcountry has changed hands twice. In 2015, John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp sold it to TSG Consumer Partners, a private-equity firm that also owns CorePower Yoga, Planet Fitness, Nuun, and a number of health, wellness, and beauty brands. Backcountry’s other sites include Steep & Cheap, Competitive Cyclist, Motosport.com, and it's European label, Bergfreunde.de.
Yeah, they are not sorry, they're only backing down due to the people who buy their (?) what do they make (?) being upset over what amounts to corporate bullying. Move to China with that!
When I think of Private Equity, I think of extreme wealth. Not even a publican traded, "this could be our 401K portfolio", or pension investment, just rich people getting richer, and not it seems bullying other small businesses who dared to use a similar name.
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