Apparently the Clorox Company has since September 2009, when they registered the mark "consisting of a flower with yellow petals with orange shades appearing toward the center of the flower, green center, and black shadow surrounding the green center." The company Method has been using daisies on its cleaning products for six years, but never bothered to register it, suggesting that Mother Earth held the patent on this one. Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan of Method were pioneers in the green marketing world, bringing transparency, humor, safe ingredients and good design to cleaning products.
Greenworks from Mega-corp Clorox launched with a bang in January, 2008. Hugely successful, they have been eating Method's lunch ever since. And now they want to eat their daisies. They have sent Method a cease and desist letter. "We have learned that your company, Method" is using a highly similar yellow daisy image in the advertisement and promotion of your cleaning product. In light of the similarity between our products we believe that the use of your daisy is likely to cause consumer confusion or deceive the public.....blah, blah blah and your use of the daisy violates Federal and State anti-dilution laws.
It's the same old story: a major corporation targets its small competition over alleged trademark infringement. McDonald's attacked McDharma's, a vegetarian fast food restaurant in Santa Cruz, California over "Mc".
After reading this in Treehugger, I immediately stopped using anything from Clorox and wrote them a letter.
Then I started thinking about this a few days later. Really how can a big company bully a little one, sue them and steal their logo and call themselves green. Green is more than the product...it is also a state of mind, and Clorox does not cut it.
So go blast them at Clorox on Facebook.
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