Making a go in the shark filled waters of small business builds character, and we do our best to innovate, and create beautiful, happy, feel-good patterns and product in these shaky times. We too easily see our patterns on everything, but when a company swipes our patterns without our authorization they go from being business people to thieves.

I launched French Bull in 2002 and used melamine as my medium to introduce a very identifiable pattern philosophy for everyday.

In August, we discovered and identified three new intellectual property infringements. Unfortunately we’ve been down this painful road many times and are always triumphant, but always think…. how cool if they”d  asked. We could all sleep peacefully and keep lawyers on positive fruitful tracks rather than nasty litigations where it’s lose lose.

Case #1 Splendida infringement - This illustration shows how Corona Hotel ware has sold dinnerware versions of our Splendida pattern exclusively to dinnerwaredepotcom and macys.com

This illustrates how Corona used our pattern for both dinnerwaredepot.com and macys.com

the infringer is Corona Hotel ware located in Florida, an offshoot of powerful and rich Corona company based in Columbia that produced a collection of dinnerware exclusively for Macy’s and dinnerware depot that looks like our Splendida pattern. The infringement on macys.com is called Khalo and sits right next to our French Bull box sets also on macys.com.

Below are more uses of our Splendida pattern by us and our licensees

authorized use of Splendida

Case #2 Paisley and Ring infringement

French Bull on the left - Jequiti's usage on the right

The offender is called Jequiti, It´s part of a huge group called Grupo Silvio Santos.

Silvio Santos, the TV presenter which owns the second biggest TV channel in Brazil.

The company has been in the news often regarding a scam the FED found in their banking practices. They almost filed for bankruptcy and the head of the group had to offer his tv network as collateral to a loan.

Case #3 Pink Paisley, Shadow Flower, and Dial infringement

The offender is Boxgraphia, another Brazilian company.