Explaining a brand's trademark historyfrom @alextwma

Transcript

So this is the logo for Polo Ralph Lauren, except it's no. This is. These two logos are mirror images of each other and they're not even the same company. The one you probably don't recognize with the horse facing right belongs to a South African company called LA Group. They registered the name Polo and that horse and rider logo in 1976. Ralph Lawrence Polo actually launched almost a decade earlier in 1967 in The US. But trademark law is local, not global. Whoever registers a name in a given country first generally gets to keep it there regardless of who used it first somewhere else. And in South Africa that was LA Group. So when Ralph Lauren eventually tried to expand into the South African market, they ran into a brand that had already locked up their own name with a nearly identical logo. Ralph Lauren sued for trademark infringement arguing LA Group had essentially copied an already famous American rank. The case dragged on for years through multiple court applications until both sides settled. Ralph Lauren would be able to sell cosmetics and fragrance in South Africa under the Polo name. Clothing on the other hand stayed entirely with LA Group. And to keep the two legally distinguishable going worse, the South African horse and rider had to face the opposite direction from Ralph Lauren's permanently by agreement. For almost fifty years that's exactly what happened. Two completely unrelated companies with the same name, mirrored logos, operating in the same malls and sometimes even the same shopping centers. Most South African shoppers had no idea there wasn't just one polo. Many just assumed the local version was simply how Ralph Lauren's rank looked in their country. Even a lot of retailers didn't fully grasp the distinction themselves. And then it got messier. In 2015, LA Group sued a third company entirely, the US Polo Association, a no profit tied to the actual sport of polo which also used its own horse and rider logo. LA Group argued the USPA's logo infringed on their South African trademarks. At one point a high court actually stripped LA Group of more than 40 of its own trademarks entirely before South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal reversed that decision and restored them. The whole saga only just ended a year ago. In late twenty twenty tier, Ralph Lauren finally acquired LA Group's South African Polo trademarks outright, buying their way out of a legal fight that had run for almost half a century. But for a lot of South Africans, it's not exactly a tidy ending. LA Group built a brand that millions of people grew up wearing, loved, and considered genuinely their own. Handing all of that over to an American company means a homegrown identity disappears along with any confusion. But only because one of them won a pretty messy legal battle.