Johnny Cupcakes

Protecting your brand / trademark is important. If you’re going to make the time & money investment into starting a company, the last thing you want is for someone to come along and steal your ideas. Do some poking around on the internet or simply call a few trademark attorney’s for some free advice. Yes, it’s an investment. However, it’s a safe investment you’re going to have to make if you plan on growing. For years now, we’ve been working with a great trademark attorney who has assisted in many cases, both national and international.

Aside from many other positives– I think one of perks of me not selling my brand wholesale to any stores whatsoever, is that anytime there is a knock-off or something fishy spotted, my loyal customers around the world will let me know immediately. Some say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I say that it’s the sincerest form of getting punched in the face. Or the sincerest form of asking for a field trip to court. Every day is a battle. Seriously, every day. Today we won a big one. Bangkok, Thailand. I was informed by quite a few Johnny Cupcakes customers that this store was carrying hundreds of fake Johnny Cupcakes t-shirts. We even got this person kicked off of eBay for selling fakes. They’ve been selling fake Johnny Cupcakes shirts for the past few years. They even wholesale them to other stores in other countries! Well well… their store was just raided by police, over 400 t-shirts were confiscated, and the owner was arrested. He’ll be going to court shortly.




Boy do I feel like I’m in an episode of Law And Order. ::::insert JUN JUN JUN sound effect::::


I didn’t think cupcakes even existed in asia?




Investigators + police officers confiscating all of the bootlegged, fake Johnny Cupcakes t-shirts for evidence.

Another one down & a few more to go. It is important for me to protect my brand. I support my friends & family with Johnny Cupcakes. Not to mention all of the charities we donate items too, and the time and money we put into this JC community we’ve built for our customers, showing them that there are alternative ways to have fun. When you spend 9 years building something with all of your hard work, emotion, risks & time, and someone attempts to eff it up in a major unethical way – you can’t help but to want to throw a president Nixon mask on and do some justice. Anyways, Karma is a female puppy.
Every case is different. Most have bad intentions, but some are just clueless mistakes. Sometimes it’s a companies fault, sometimes it’s the person that they hired to submit some designs. The way we deal with each case is often different from another. From a phone call or an e-mail to the person, as communication is very important, and as I mentioned before, it could be a mere mistake. Then depending on how severe and ill mannered some of these situations are, it could be a cease & desist letter, a DMCA takedown notice — to a police investigation, police raid, lawsuit, or a good old fashioned fist fight. There’s been many where all I’ve asked for is a simple apology.

All in all, protecting your trademark is important. Some people think you make all this money going after people. You really don’t. The rare times you win money, it goes right into all of the lawyer / attorney fees. But you feel good inside, knowing that you just took down a bad guy. It’s also nice to know that tens of thousands of Johnny Cupcakers around the world have my back. Torches, battle-axes & flaming cupcakes — they’re ready for war.