From home offices, world of new brands sprouts
Tom Moffitt didn’t need a pandemic to prompt the launch of his Culture Fresh Foods in Naugatuck, which took over an old YoCrunch plant to produce plant-based alternatives for yogurt, cottage cheese, and other dairy staples.
If by sheer coincidence his company filed to secure rights to its Seed to Spoon brand the day after Gov. Ned Lamont declared a public emergency in Connecticut last March, it seems apparent that the pandemic had just a causal effect on thousands more to follow suit.
From their home offices during the pandemic, brand managers for companies based or incorporated in Connecticut filed more new trademarks than any year since 2000. Trademark filings topped the 5,000 threshold for just the third time, coming about 200 trademarks short of the record level lodged in 1999.
It wasn’t just Connecticut — the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office logged nearly 655,000 trademark filings last year, a 32 percent pop from 2019 to shatter the previous record of just over 495,000 that year. In 2017, the Patent & Trademark Office streamlined the process for both securing a trademark as well as challenging illicit use by other entities in violation of intellectual property rights.
The burst of activity last year suggests that while many employers in Connecticut and nationally were focused on the immediate problem of making payroll, there were plenty that got to work reinvigorating brands growing stale or setting up new products for
success — whether established businesses or startups.
Cutting through the clutter
Count Culture Fresh Foods is a new company starting full production next month of its nondairy yogurt and other products, after initial market testing in Woodbury and New York City. Moffitt said the pandemic pushed back the launch date by several months, but that the company has otherwise been successful in retooling the YoCrunch factory to produce Seed to Spoon.
The company has 20 employees today, with plans to hire more.
If the first step for getting Seed to Spoon into the consumer conscious is getting it onto store shelves, it doesn’t get any easier after that, Moffitt said. He knows — he helped Stop & Shop establish store brands before going on to lead a Vermont startup, then landing back in his home state of Connecticut.
“There’s tremendous amounts of competition — I’ve been in the food industry my whole life, and anyone with an idea can create something,” Moffitt said. “You see all the hype with plant-based foods which are very on-trend right now . ... The biggest challenge is just getting on the shelf and getting the retail buyer’s attention, because they are just trying to cut through all the clutter. There’s just so many brands.”
The same day that Culture Fresh Foods filed, the Guilford artificial intelligence startup InveniAI took a momentary pause from its work identifying drugs that could potentially address COVID-19 to wall off the trademark for OmniVirtuo, an online data processing engine for the pharmaceutical industry.
And Bigelow Tea, among Connecticut’s longer running brands, reserved rights to the “Settling is not an Option” tagline that the Fairfield manufacturer had already been sprinkling into its marketing. Bigelow registered its current “Tea Proudly” slogan in 2016, and is on the fourth renewal of its “Constant Comment” brand that was used for the first time in 1944.
Connecticut marketeers filed less than three dozen trademarks that year, with one filed by Timex the lone other still memorable to many today.
The oldest surviving trademark to have originated in Connecticut is the World Tableware brand, registered with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in July 1903 by American Silver Co. based at the time in Bristol. The trademark was renewed for fifth time in 2013 by successor company Wasserstrom, a tableware and food-service supplies giant based in Ohio today.
This week PepsiCo became the latest company to grab headlines in abandoning a historic trademark. The Purchase, N.Y.-based giant introduced Pearl Milling Co. to phase out its Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup brand, whose logo has long been criticized as promoting a racial stereotype. PepsiCo and subsidiary Quaker Oats acted after rallies nationally last year in support of racial equity.
What’s in a trademark today? It could be a nod to heritage, like Amergint Technologies registering a simple logo for Danbury Mission Technologies, located at the space and defense optics lab on Wooster Heights Road it acquired last year from Raytheon Technologies.
It might be something to grab eyeballs by piquing curiosity, like Disheveled Diva making cakes and baked goods in Hartford. Or it could conjure positive feelings in the shopper, as the case with the online fashion startup Shrewd Closet launched by Stamford resident Raven Hudson.
“My target audience is ... working women who have to dress up for work but dislike the traditional workwear [and] like to find unique items,” Hudson stated in an email describing her decision to start the brand. “I know women love to have fun outside of work too ... so, I source items that fit social settings like happy hour [and] date nights.”
Of course, a larger crosssection of trademarks describe the premise of the product itself, like Stubble Eraser from the Schick brand of Shelton-based Edgewell Personal Care designed to produce less tug during shaving.
“We remain focused on building our brands, being more consumer-centric, better consumer targeting, bringing better-picked campaigns and messaging,” said Edgewell CEO Rod Little on Thursday during a conference call with investment analysts on the company’s marketing efforts during the pandemic. “The net result of that is we’ve held our [shelf ] space across the planograms in wet shave despite new competitive entrants.”
To broaden awareness for today’s entrepreneurs, the Patent & Trademark Office has been running online “boot camps” early this year to familiarize people with the process and costs to secure rights, with a primer online at uspto.gov/ trademarks/basics. Application fees start at $250, but costs can escalate depending on additional documentation filed to support an initial application, keeping “live” an approved trademark or fending off any challenges to a turn-of-phrase or design mark.
Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Booking Holdings in a landmark lawsuit filed by the Patent & Trademark Office over whether companies are allowed to own “generic.com” internet domains. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion preserving the Norwalkbased giant’s exclusive use of the Booking.com travel website.
“If ‘Booking.com’ were generic, we might expect consumers to understand Travelocity — another such service — to be a ‘Booking.com,’” Ginsburg wrote. “We might similarly expect that a consumer, searching for a trusted source of online hotel-reservation services, could ask a frequent traveler to name her favorite ‘Booking.com’ provider. Consumers do not in fact perceive the term ‘Booking.com’ that way.”