The Boot Wars: What's Happening
To The Australian Ugg?
When Brian Smith first came to the United States
with a bag full of
Australian
Ugg boots and started an international fashion
craze he had no way of knowing that the Ugg brand
name he trademarked for his boots would start an
international marketing war.
“’ Ugg’ is a
generic term like ‘trainers’
or ‘sneakers,”
says Australian parliament member Sharryn Jackson.
“It defies belief that an
Australian icon would be trademarked in the US.”
The controversy over the patented use of the word
ugg (and the lawsuits that Australian manufacturers
have been facing resulting from their continued use
of this casual term, used to refer to a style of
sheepskin boot that has been popular among men women
and children in Australia for the past four decades
or longer) has raged since the Australian born
surfer patented the term “Ugg”
to refer to his line of sheepskin boots being
marketed in the United States and sold the trademark
to Decker Outdoor Corporation. Since then, according
to Australian companies, Decker and their
subsidiary, Ugg Holdings Inc., have tried vehemently
to squash any attempt to market a boot bearing the
name ugg-even though the term ugg was used to
describe these pieces of practical and fashionable
footwear long before Smith ever crossed the
Atlantic.
It’s like they’re
trying to squash anything with the letters ug…
Australians believe they’ve
been more than patient with Brian Smith’s
attempts to carry the Australian tradition to the
western hemisphere, offering little protest when he
first applied for a patent for the term Ugg with
regard to his footwear even though ederal trade law
firmly states that generic terms cannot be patented
to prevent the hundreds of millions of lawsuits that
would result from situations like this one where a
brand name attempts to hog the market on a product
used and sold by manufacturers across an entire
continent. They even kept silent when moved
production of brand name Ugg boots to China, where
manufacturing can be done for a fraction of the cost
of having the supposedly authentic Australian boots
actually made in Australia, even though it
was seen by many as an insult to the Australian
people to move production of a native Australian
product overseas.
But attempting to stop Australian manufacturers
from marketing ugg boots as uggs was the last straw
for many.
"We have been selling sheepskin products for 30
years, long before ugg boots became popular in
America and the UK, to have to give up the name is
just not fair," Mr. Sullivan, production manager at
Westhaven Industries. Westhaven is a non-profit
organization whose Dubbo, Australia factory employs
the disabled to produce ugg boots for the Australian
market. The company is currently among those facing
legal action from Decker.
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