Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: Knock Off The Knock-Offs
With Memorial day behind us, I totally forgot that today was Wednesday and I owe my dedicated fans a blog. Sorry for the delay. On top of that, I was almost done with the blog and then had to step out for an appointment. In the interim, my IT guy fixed my computer and VOILE!…he fixed it real well. So well, that my entire blog vanished into thin air. The life of a blogger isn’t easy, please cut me some slack.
As you probably now, in addition to being President and Sales Manager of Studioe, I am also the president of A.E.Nathan. This is really an A.E. Nathan story, but I think it is important for you to hear nonetheless.
Every year, A.E. Nathan designs and produces a massive printed flannel line containing over 150 designs. Since we create so many designs each year, we don’t have the time or the resources to copyright every design. It is not practical to do that or cost effective. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for this.
Late last year, I was informed by my legitimate Canadian distributor that many of our designs were popping up all over Canada, but they weren’t being sold by our legitimate Canadian partners nor were they of the A.E. Nathan quality which is nothing short of awesome if I couldn’t say so myself. This was very frustrating and baffling to say the least. So I had our legitimate distributors send me some samples of the knocked off goods. Not only were they knocking off the goods, but they were using our name “Comfy Flannel” which ironically enough I had just trademarked last year in the US. Unfortunately, the US trademark didn’t help us in Canada so we are in the process of trademarking “Comfy Flannel” in Canada. Good thing is that it isn’t too late to go after someone for using the name…even after the fact like in this situation.
Long story short, it turned out that someone in Canada was taking our designs and printing them in China very poorly. How we figured out that they were produced in China is kind of interesting. For one, the selvedge of the fabric was frayed whereas our goods have a closed and smooth selvedge. Moreover, the knock off artist printed some of our designs on dark grounds like red, green and black. In Pakistan, we pigment print all of our flannel which doesn’t allow us to print the very heavy dark grounds. If we did print those heavy dark grounds, the goods would be super stiff and essentially unusable.
In any case, it is really sad that people have to cut corners and try to cheat the system. The good news is that we are pursuing this issue very seriously and hope to bring the culprit to justice real soon or at least have him stop doing what he is doing. I hope to be able to write about a positive conclusion to this story in the coming months and let the world know who the thief is. So if you happen to be buying A.E. Nathan flannel, please make sure that it is legitimate by looking to see if the selvedge is smooth, it says not intended for children’s sleepwear and that the grounds are not very heavy dark colors. If you have a doubt, please feel free to contact me to inquire.
That’s the best I can do for you today. Hope to have something more exciting to talk about next week.
Scott