Gerber Onesies vs Airiane and Doug
p2pnet news view Advertising | P2P:- Airiane Rogers-Baribeau and her husband, Doug, are friends of ours, here in Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, BC.
Our daughter, Emma, baby-sits their kids, Solomon (six) and O’Carra (three), and Airiane’s dad helped us renovate our house, which is a gentle stroll from theirs.
Helped us? He did 90% of the work.
Airiane and Doug are, like us, home-schoolers and, also like us, they’re self-employed, Airiane as a designer and Doug as a graphic artist and t-shirt printer.
Together, they run Little Inkers, a clothing company for kids which specialises in organic cotton tees, printed with PVC phathalate-free inks on sustainable cloth.
Eco-friendly, in other words. And they do everything themselves by hand from design to print.
Now they’re looking for a pro bono lawyer. And it’s all because of Onesies, a “registered trademark often used in the United States as if it were generic,” says the Wikipedia.
However, it’s a registered trademark of Gerber Childrenswear, “which objects to both the usage of the term as a generic name and the usage of the singular form ‘Onesie’,” says the post, stating, “Gerber Childrenswear continues to aggressively enforce and defend its trademark.”
Which is why Airiane and Doug are looking for legal help.
Proprietary trademarked name
A couple of days back Airiane opened her email found a nasty missive from Gerber, once a giant of the US baby food industry, but owned by the Swiss drug company, Sandoz.
She’d used the word ‘onesies’ to describe one of her clothing items for kids, a one-piece body suit for babies — just like the one worn by O’Carra on the right.
Until then, Airiane had believed ‘onesies’ was just a casual generic term, never suspecting for one instant it was a proprietary trademarked name owned, and jealously guarded by, the Gerber baby food company whose busines, not at all incidentally, rests on being nice to mummies and daddies and their children.
Once she’d recovered from the shock, she did a search and found well over a million references to onezies, and various spellings thereof.
So what was Gerber doing, picking on her?
One of the scores of lawyers employed by Gerber to trawl the net looking for problems had come across Airiane’s post on Etsy, which advertises itself online as, “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade”.
“I woke up one morning to find a message from Etsy saying it’d deactivated some of my listings in because of a letter it’d received from a lawyer at Gerber Childrenswear,” she says.
On her Little Inkers blog, “I was dumbfounded,” she says, “and a little flattered … really Little Inkers?I had only four items listed, only two of which were listed under the term ONEZEE !”
She goes on »»»
When I do a Google search for Onesies I come up with “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,630,00
0 for onesie “and “Results 1 – 10 of about 17,500 for onezee”.
Are all these boutiques, stores and designers also receiving cease and desist letters?
That’s a lot of letters and a hefty lawyer bill Gerber, especially to protect something that appears to be a lost cause.
I understand the need for Gerber to protect their trademark, but I didn’t know onesie was a trademark and I had no idea that all variations of it including onezee were also trademarked.
I have some research to do in order to further educate myself on this topic.
I think onesie should fall under a generalized trademark, in today’s day and age onesies are a household name, a google search word, a word used to describe an article of baby apparel on almost every online store I have ever come across.
Why oh why is Gerber so worried about our little business anyways?
Why indeed?
Has Gerber adopted a policy made popular by Hollywood and the Big 4 record labels under which they go after very ordinary people with very ordinary incomes, knowing full well they won’t be able to mount adequate legal defences?
They’re probably arguing that if they let Airiane use the name without nailing her, lots of other people will do the same, to the detriment of their ‘product’.
But how is it a detriment? Does Gerber seriously claim because people such as her use the name the company will consequently suffer a significant loss in sales?
In reality, rather than detracting from Gerber onesies, the useage of the term by Airiane and others is more likely a valuable form of viral marketing which would have cost Gerber hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in concept and other fees if it’d deliberately tried to implement it in a PR campaign.
A mean-minded foreign conglomerate
If Gerber tried this on 10 years ago, it might have gotten away with it. But this is the 21st digital century when people communicate with each other directly via blogs, web pages,email, cellphones, IM, chat, and so on.
What Gerber should have done was write a nice letter to Airiane thanking her for the free publicity.
Instead, it’s presented a picture of itself as a petty and mean-minded foreign conglomerate whose only interest is in its bottom line and which believes the customer comes last.
Canada’s Watoto, founded by Senior Pastors Gary and Marilyn Skinner and with an outlet in Victoria, BC’s capital on Vancouver Island, says it’s a, “response to the cry of the orphaned and vulnerable children of Africa, whose lives have been ravaged by war and disease.
It advertises organic cotton onezees online.
Will Gerber now go after Watoto?
Across the border, “FunZees, a newly launched company solely dedicated to fun and funny and founded by veterans in the retail industry, will officially launch its line of OneZees, featuring 50 of the funniest one liners and phrases, at New York`s ENK Children`s Club, August 3-5,” said a press release last year, going on, ” While onesies are ubiquitous, OneZees` funny quips are anything but.”
Did FunZees pay Gerber some kind of copyright fee to be able to market OneZees?
Do a search on your favourite engine and you’ ll find all kinds of mentions of onesies.
Is Gerber going after them all? If not, why are they bullying Airiane and Doug?
If you’re a lawyer somewhere on the island, or in BC, and you’d like to help them make Gerber realise it can’ t do this kind of thing, please get in touch Airiane and Doug at info @ littleinkers dot ca, or with me at p2pnet @ shaw dot ca, and I’ll pass your message along.
Definitely stay tuned.
Cheers! And thanks …
_______________
UPDATE: Also see Woman sued for Twitter `defamation`
Jon Newton – p2pnet
July, 2009
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July 28th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Onezee Twozee SUEzee
Profit from lawsuits The (not so) new side-economy of business with many investors.
July 28th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
They think they can do what they want, but they can’t.
Good on ya, Airiane (and Doug, of course
)
July 28th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
http://daddytypes.com/2009/06/25/gerber_hanna_andersson_spun_off_to_pay_the_bills.php
http://www.hooversbiz.com/2007/05/09/novartis-prepares-to-spoon-feed-gerber-to-nestle/
http://catholicinformation.aquinasandmore.com/2009/02/04/onesie-onesie-onesie-or-the-silliness-of-gerber/
July 29th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Thanks to Gerber’s lawyers I now know of Little Inkers, whose products would make great gifts for little ones. So thanks, Gerber.
The one thing that struck me is that on her website Airiane calls her garments Onezees, not onesies. One has to wonder whether Gerber actually trademarked that variation of the spelling. Surely a trademark for ‘onesie’ doesn’t give them the right to lay claim to all variations in spelling. Hey, how about Juansies?
As the homebirthing mother of another unschooler nothing would had made me feed Gerber’s bottled pap to my child. Anyway, back in the days when my kid was that young I never thought of Gerber when I heard the word “onesie”.
July 29th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
mornin’ ! well there is another reason why i be so sick of hearing the word copywrite!! the two words copywrite and lawsuite have become joined at the hip!! it used to be a way to protect someone from theft,has become a club to beat into submission someone who,not being a montrously big cartel,has not the resourse to fend them off!! who gives them the right,where do they get the adastity to attack this young couple and there children?? we do,unfortunately.we’ve let the big companies,cartels,what ever, call the shots and basically rolled over dead. was bad enough when it was music,now it’s people’s livelyhoods and there families!! shame on us . Jon,if there is no pro bono lawyer out there for them,you have my addy let me know please,and i’ll take something from my well used $$ base and contribute toward paying toward one,i really don’t think we can leave them to try this alone.this is a forgien(spell) attacking one of our own Canadian families! i think it be time we stopped it afore it really gets anymore out of hand !! be well all !!
July 29th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
From – Woman sued for Twitter âdefamationâ – http://www.p2pnet.net/story/25786
Eric Says: The word Onesie has existed (as spoken, not necessarily in print) for centuries. Little children are taught the rhyme âOnesie, twosy, threesy, foursieâ¦â Imagine if Xerox Corporation named themselves Photocopyâ¦
Cheers!
July 30th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Wow, thank you for all the support! I am really also thankful to Jon for writing this about us.
August 7th, 2009 at 6:11 am
I too have had the lawyers email as I sell baby bodysuits not of the gerber variety in my etsy store, I have taken the offending word out of all of my listings which has resulted in my views plummeting. But how come all of the other sellers are being allowed to carry on listing non gerber bodysuits as onesies? I feel that etsy is not allowing us a level playing field. I second what mollahzee said!
Alison (frutejuce)