The legal battle between Tiger Woods' apparel brand Sun Day Red and cooling company Tigeraire has been escalated after the 15-time Major champion's business "reluctantly" opted to sue the Louisiana-based firm.
Tigeraire - a company that sells fans and other cooling products - originally filed an opposition notice to the US Patent and Trademark Office in late September which claimed Sun Day Red had "unlawfully hijacked" its logo to use on clothes and other items.
Both emblems include minimalist tiger designs, with Woods stating that the 15 stripes included in his company's logo was designed to pay homage to each of his Major triumphs. He later said in an exclusive interview on The Today Show with Carson Daly that he hopes to ruin the logo by winning number 16 at some point.
However, court filings which were first reported by CNBC's Jessica Golden showed that Tigeraire felt Sun Day Red - backed by TaylorMade - had violated their logo trademark.
Said document read: "The actions of SDR, TaylorMade and Tiger Woods blatantly ignore Tigeraire’s long-standing protected mark, brand and identity, violate federal and state intellectual property law, and disregard the consumer confusion their actions create. SDR’s application should be denied."
Woods and co. had begun the process of trying to have their own emblem trademarked, but that action was halted upon news of the objection notice.
TaylorMade Golf, which had 40 days to respond to the notice from the original date, told CNBC that it has "full confidence in the securitization of our trademarks."
Days later, a subsequent court filing submitted to the US District Court for the Central District of California on September 27 shows the 48-year-old's legal team had not only launched a motion to dismiss Tigeraire's original objection notice, but that it is also "reluctantly" sueing the cooling business.
In the suit, Sun Day Red said: "This case, unfortunately, presents the time-worn circumstance of an opportunistic, misguided business attempting to extract an unwarranted financial windfall from a larger and more successful brand, based on threats of legal action and demands for exorbitant sums.”
Sun Day Red went on to argue that it had spent "several months" trying to convince Tigeraire it had no basis for legal action and that the apparel business was seeking court intervention in order to "protect its innovative and iconic new brand" from the cooling company's "ongoing interference, threats, and outrageous demands."
Woods' business also offered almost four pages of evidence under 'Nature Of The Action' to support its claims - part of a 75-page total document - which stated that Tigeraire had begun "attending golf tournaments, changed its website’s home page to prominently feature golfers, and frantically added apparel to its product offerings – all in a clear attempt to manufacture the appearance of overlap where none existed in the actual marketplace."
However, in a statement sent to Golf Monthly, Tigeraire says the company "has a right to protect" its own brand after having previously "repeatedly attempted to negotiate an amicable solution, which SDR refused."
Tigeraire's CEO, Jack Karavich said: “Tigeraire’s logo and name pays tribute to our close collaboration with Louisiana State University - our first partners in this technology. We believe in player and personnel safety and created a technology to protect the health of athletes and blue-collar workers laboring outdoors in the heat.
“This brand and logo are personal, and we have a right to protect it. To have a foreign, private equity firm sue us for enforcing this right and then claim we are just after a payday is insulting to every single person at our small company working to deliver quality products that improve the lives of our customers.”
Meanwhile, Tigeraire's intellectual property attorney, Greg Latham argued that not only is "SDR’s logo diluting Tigeraire’s protected brand and causing market confusion" but the subsequent lawsuit is "inappropriate" and should be handed by a Louisiana court as opposed to a Californian one.
Latham said: “SDR’s lawyers are attempting to drag Tigeraire into SDR’s backyard in California with an inappropriate anticipatory filing. We believe strongly that the only logical jurisdiction for court proceedings would be in Louisiana, where Tigeraire was founded in partnership with Louisiana State University (LSU) and the LSU football team.
“Despite the obvious mismatch between a Goliath multi-billion-dollar South Korean private equity firm fronted by an iconic, global superstar athlete and the Baton Rouge-based sports tech startup, Tigeraire intends to actively fight these manipulative legal maneuvers and prevail in court. We are confident that the California court will agree that jurisdiction does not exist in California and dismiss SDR’s inappropriate lawsuit.”
