Re-branding Generic Products by Adding your Logo to another Company’s Products
If you’re an Amazon seller dipping your toe into the water of developing your own private label brand, don’t make this mistake.
Many sellers buy generic products and stick their logo on that product and then say, ‘this is our branded product,’ and create a new listing on Amazon. You can’t do that if the product has any branding on it at all. It is a clear trademark violation to have your logo made on a sticker, for example, and put it on somebody else’s product. You can’t do it, 100% violation.
Now, how do we know this? My law firm does a whole lot more than write the world’s greatest plans of action and the most persuasive Amazon appeals to get your accounts & listings back. We have an entire team devoted to representing you in arbitration against Amazon to get your money back and your inventory back.
We have an entire department devoted to litigation, representing Amazon sellers in court and settling legal claims against you if there any are asserted. We have two teams in China to help you with sourcing. And we also have an entire unit devoted to what we call business law for sellers, which is traditional legal services, specifically geared towards Amazon sellers.
Why can’t can’t you take your logo, your sticker, your trademark, and stick it on a generic product?
Well, number one, it’s grounded in what’s called ‘consumer confusion’. Most of intellectual property law is geared to protect the rights owner and also the consumers. And if you are covering up somebody else’s branded product, or even somebody else’s generic product with simply adding your sticker, that creates customer confusion as to the quality & source for that particular product. So don’t do it at all. I know Amazon sellers engage in business and you do things often without really knowing whether there is or not an intellectual property violation.
So let’s say you did this, you bought a branded product, you had a sticker made with your logo on it and put it on a product you were selling, and then you receive a complaint. What in the world do we do to help you?
When that happens the goal is always the same. It’s the same for any intellectual property rights complaint, any rights owner complaint, the goal is to get that complaint retracted in a specific way so that Amazon recognizes the retraction and takes it off your Amazon account. What do you do? You first contact the rights owner who made the complaint. Their email address is right there on the notice to you from Amazon, that such and such at whatever.com made a complaint against you. You want to reach out to that complainant and try and persuade that complainant to take back their complaint and then give them the mechanism to do it correctly.
It’s got to be done from the same email address where the complaint came from. It has to have certain language or else Amazon will never remove it from your account. If the person or company that made the complaint refuses to retract or doesn’t respond to you at all, or you’ve checked the USPTO and they don’t even own the rights to that product, then you want to write a persuasive letter to noticedispute@amazon.com.
Thank you for joining me for today’s Amazon Sellers Lawyer Insider Information.
For more information on intellectual property law:
- Resolving Multiple Intellectual Property Complaints for an Amazon Seller
- 4 areas of intellectual property that you, as an Amazon seller, need to know about.
- Why Amazon Sellers Should Register Intellectual Property
- Amazon baseless complaints made against sellers (Counterfeit & Inauthentic).
- Multiple Intellectual Property Right Complaints & Amazon Suspensions
