The Snuggies Sabotage Conspiracy?

Just thought of yet another silly little conspiracy: what if the reason Huggies ever found out about Snuggies was that a rival abdl company had tipped them off?
Discuss.
:detective1:

I don't think it is that crazy at all.

I never heard the entire story about that. Was Snuggies sued by Huggies?

INTrePid said:

I never heard the entire story about that. Was Snuggies sued by Huggies?

Click to expand...

While I don't think we heard any official word from anyone, that's a very popular assumption. The most likely scenario was a swarm of lawyers descended on Snuggies and threatened to sue them into next Tuesday for using a similar name to their trademark, on a similar product. Got a legal paper thrown in front of them to sign off that they were going to immediately stop using "snuggies" anywhere and probably got gagged with some form of NDA so they couldn't talk about the bullying they just received, in exchange for not being bankrupted by lawyer fees. So we haven't really heard much of anything from Tykables other than they changed their name. They were apparently allowed to sell off their remaining product, and kept the snuggies.com domain name (at least for awhile) to redirect their customers.

That's just how it is in America, if you're big, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. You can kill (or just plain threaten to kill) a small business with having to defend against neverending expensive lawsuits.

I HIGHLY doubt that another ABDL company tipped off Kimberly-Clark about Snuggies. I'm pretty sure they just found out through Google. While I'm sure there's friendly competition between the big ABDL companies, I don't see any of them going to lengths like that.

We know Snuggies weren't sued by Huggies because there's been no public court filing (we'd be able to see it and somebody by now would have found and posted it). They likely received a simple threat letter and decided that making a change was the best way to avoid any problems.

ArchieRoni said:

We know Snuggies weren't sued by Huggies because there's been no public court filing (we'd be able to see it and somebody by now would have found and posted it). They likely received a simple threat letter and decided that making a change was the best way to avoid any problems.

Click to expand...

This was sort of explained on Reddit months ago, but Kimberly-Clark challenged the old name (.pdf link) and some sort of settlement was worked out that allowed Tykables to sell their remaining stock while rebranding. They also apparently were running into trademark issues as they tried to sell in other countries given different standards. We're extremely unlikely to ever learn the exact details given whatever wall of lawyers and/or NDAs is involved.

In fairness, "Snuggies" was two letters off of "Huggies", and with 20/20 hindsight it makes all the sense in the world that a company selling baby diapers to a mainstream audience had a problem with that.

Fruitkitty said:

[...] with 20/20 hindsight it makes all the sense in the world that a company selling baby diapers to a mainstream audience had a problem with that.

Click to expand...

I disagree.
First of all, Snuggies was such a small niche company compared to the Huggies conglomerate that it's not that plausible that Huggies would have found out by themselves.

Secondly, in the United States there is a law called the "parody law", just Google "stupid Starbucks".

some1 said:

I disagree.
First of all, Snuggies was such a small niche company compared to the Huggies conglomerate that it's not that plausible that Huggies would have found out by themselves.

Secondly, in the United States there is a law called the "parody law", just Google "stupid Starbucks".

Click to expand...

It's entirely plausible. I think you underestimate how wide the focus of market intelligence agencies and market trend analysts is. The market for ABDL nappies may be small, but it is growing, and I assure you, someone will have taken note. Most likely, it came to the attention of someone at Depends, since they are in the adult nappy business after all - maybe a market report, maybe a trade publication, maybe going to a convention, or maybe they have contacts within the ABDL community - and they passed the information onto Huggies, since they both have the same parent company, Kimberly Clark.

Anyway, to maintain control of your trademark, you have to defend it. For valuable trademarks, that sometimes means being heavy-handed. The courts aren't always predictable, even for companies with deep pockets, so obviously a company is going to err on the side of an aggressive defence. That's just business, unfortunately. Huggies could probably have done far more damage to Snuggies than they actually did.

some1 said:

I disagree.
First of all, Snuggies was such a small niche company compared to the Huggies conglomerate that it's not that plausible that Huggies would have found out by themselves.

Secondly, in the United States there is a law called the "parody law", just Google "stupid Starbucks".

Click to expand...

Here's the rub: even if a company doesn't mind you using a similar brand, their lawyers will still recommend being aggresive about it. No they're not trying to be dicks, they're doing it for a very good reason. In the USA anyway, a trademark or brand can be protected, but that protection requires you to defend it. What that means is that if you ignore someone using a brand similar to yours, and then someone else comes along and tries to do the same, in court they will try to compare their brand against the other brand you ignored, saying that if theirs was ok, ours should be ok too. It sounds a bit petty, but it's ended up being a usable defense in court often enough that nowadays lawyers will urge brand owners to aggressively defend their marks. The general rule is that if you have someone possibly infringing on your mark and you're OK with it, you NEED to get the lawyers involved anyway, and draw up lenient (or close to free) licensing for them. Otherwise you fail to defend your mark and can make defending it later more difficult.

Thanks for the PDF link, FruitKitty. "ikelihood of confusion" and "dilution" are the stated grounds, as expected. On paper they're saying that (A) there is a risk of customers confusing your product for theirs because the trademarked objects (symbol, brand, name, etc) are similar enough and the products are in the same or closely related markets. Or (B) the presence of a similar mark may lower brand recognition - when someone hears "huggies" they want the consumer to only associate that with their product, and not have others on their mind as possible matches. That's dillusion because it "dillutes the potency of their mark". Either one of these is damaging to marketing of a product.

So they have a good reason to do what they did, and it's legally justified. So there's no reason to get upset with them over it. Snuggies being a niche market doesn't matter because the niche is very close to the market the trademark owner is in. Note that "snuggies" is not uniquely owned by KC. Think of those TV blankets with the armholes in the front, those are Snuggies too. But they're not diapers, so KC doesn't mind. They might have minded if Snuggies were disposable and marked as something absorbent that could stop your spilled drink from getting on your couch, because then you're getting closer to their market of absorbent, disposable products. (I'd have to look, but it's actually possible they did a lilttle lawyer jousting with them, just to show they are "defending their mark", even if they knew it wouldn't accomplish anything, a lot of branding is posturing)

Well, that was a really put together explanation, bambinod. thank you for clarifying!

Some major corporations actually pay people to search out similar companies for the very reasons that Bambinod explained above. They know that if they fall asleep on the issue of defending their trademarks, it could cost them.

Well to be fair I think it was actual copywright infringement.

Example: Snuggies the diaper/Snuggie the blanket with sleves.

I got one as a presant from my mom one year and have given some as gifts myself. (Snuggie the blanket)

ABDL4ever said:

Well to be fair I think it was actual copywright infringement.

Example: Snuggies the diaper/Snuggie the blanket with sleves.

I got one as a presant from my mom one year and have given some as gifts myself. (Snuggie the blanket)

Click to expand...

I caught that vibe as well from the first day I heard about them. Back when I was in high school, we struck a brand deal with Snuggies (the blanket company that is) to make specially branded units with our school logo on it. Looking back at this fiasco, I just kinda sit back and chuckle at the idea of a super masculine catholic school's logo proudly printed on an ABDL product XD

Bokeh said:

Some major corporations actually pay people to search out similar companies for the very reasons that Bambinod explained above. They know that if they fall asleep on the issue of defending their trademarks, it could cost them.

Click to expand...

All major corporations pay people to do these searches, not just some. It's also extremely easy. The PDF that Fruitkitty linked is a public filing from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It's like watching a news feed, you just need somebody to look at the new filings every day.

ABDL4ever said:

Well to be fair I think it was actual copywright infringement.

Example: Snuggies the diaper/Snuggie the blanket with sleves.

I got one as a presant from my mom one year and have given some as gifts myself. (Snuggie the blanket)

Click to expand...

Trademark. It was trademark, not copyright. You can't copyright a one-word name. They're two completely different things with different purposes.

Copyright is a protection for creative works: it protects things like books, art, music, photographs and video games, among others. It's a legal right to stop people from making copies of a creative work without permission as a way to give creative people an incentive to do their creative thing. The idea being that if there's no way to stop anyone copying, say, your book, then after you won't make any money from writing it because one guy will just scan it and post it on the Internet. You can't copyright single words or short phrases, and you can't copyright something that isn't original (like, if you just draw a circle, you can't copyright that). It's about rewarding creativity.

Trademark is a protection for logos, slogans, and jingles used for business. The idea behind trademark is to avoid confusing people about where stuff comes from. For example, if you see a red label with "coca-cola" in white script, you know that was manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company and you know that it's safe to drink the stuff in the bottle. Similarly, if you see, say, the Nike Swoosh on stuff, you can feel confident that it's a good quality shoe or piece of clothing. Even ABDL companies do this with things like the diaper names. If somebody starts talking about a Bellisimo, we all know that refers to a diaper made by Bambino and not to some other diaper.

The Snuggies thing was a trademark dispute. Kimberly-Clark said "hey, Snuggies sounds too much like Huggies, people will get confused and think they're related." The guys making Snuggies decided that rather than try to fight that out, it would be best for everyone is they just changed the name to something more agreeable.

Edit: One more thing on this. Where people get confused is that some things can have both. Let's take the Starbucks logo as an example. It's a pretty artistic logo, it's got that siren drawing with a really distinctive green color and a couple stars in there. It's also the thing Starbucks sticks on all its coffee cups and shops to let you know that what you're getting comes from the Starbucks company. So that logo might be protected by both copyright and trademark. What that means in practice is that using the logo on stuff that doesn't come from Starbucks is a problem, and ALSO just making a bunch of copies of the logo could be a problem (like, say if you tried to sell stickers without permission).