Posts Tagged ‘ Gary Friedman ’

In The Navy? Restoration Hardware Knock-Off Lawsuit Says Knock It Off

October 3rd, 2012. By AbiK

After being on the receiving end of some hard knocks (read: internal investigation re: dating younger staffer and having to step down from CEO prior to IPO as result), Gary Friedman and his former company, Restoration Hardware, have been told to knock it off with the knock-offs via a newly filed trademark infringement lawsuit. And no, we can’t possibly fit another “knock” into that sentence.

Here’s the thing. It’s no a-ha moment that Restoration Hardware (aka RH) along with just about every other mass market furniture retailer knocks off some original designs—typically with a tweak here and there and a downgrade on the materials and manufacturing—in order to sell “design” to the masses at a lower price.  Those design modifications, however, are usually significant enough, even to the untrained eye, to establish the wannabe design as “reflective of” the original design without being an exact mirror image of it.

Enter Restoration Hardware’s Naval Chair. No, you can’t find it on their website at present because they’ve since renamed this chair the “Aluminum Standard Side Chair.” Regardless, that chair, according to the lawsuit, is strikingly similar in look to the one that the folks at Emeco originally designed for the US Navy. Heck, RH apparently didn’t even take too many strides to alter the name—”Navy” to “Naval”? Please.

For those of you who don’t follow “design”, here’s some background from Emeco’s website:

“Emeco was originally founded following a collaborative project with Alcoa to develop a seaworthy chair for submarines and warships. The Navy chairs are impervious to corrosion, non magnetic, lightweight and most importantly incredibly strong – attributes of aluminum that we have now grown to appreciate and love. By the end of the 1950’s Emeco aluminum chairs outfitted all famous U.S Navy Ships and submarines including the first nuclear submarine, Nautilus.”

No question, the Emeco Navy® Chair (note the registered trademark symbol) has been in continuous production and easily identifiable for quite some time.

The lawsuit was filed soon after RH’s IPO filing—tbd on what kind of impact it might have, if any. That, after highly mixed reviews following RH’s re-image a while back—comments like “trendy fake” on one forum come to mind. If you’re not familiar with the new look, two words sum it up: oversized and monotone. The pic at right is a personal fave—the light fixture—try having a conversation around that baby—where’s Seinfeld when you need him? It must appeal to someone, just hard to imagine whom—particularly when your flip through their baby room “showroom” online and find yourself immersed in a whir of endless beige and mushroom and envision a child welcomed into a world of blah.

And get this, they now have plans—according to the WSJ’s report on RH’s IPO—to go into apparel, accessories, footwear and jewelry. Anyone want to venture a guess as to what the palette will be? Someone get them a color wheel—stat!

In the meantime, we’ll have to see where this one nets out.

Tags: Emeco, Gary Friedman, Naval Chair, Navy Chair, Restoration Hardware, RH, RH Lawsuit, Trademark Infringement
Posted in Intellectual Property, lawsuits | No Comments »