Most companies know that they have to respect the trademarks, specifically the symbols, of other companies and organisations. But even large organisations sometimes fall foul of the law, whether absent-mindedly or in full cognisance of their actions.
A legal case currently being heard in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico is alleging both trademark violations infringements of the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act. This act legislates the sale of Indian arts and crafts and covers fake artworks and claims that falsely suggest products are of American Indian manufacture or provenance. The Navajo tribe has around a dozen registered trademarks the cover use of the Navajo and Navajo Nation names on clothing, footwear, textiles and household products both in shops and as online retail sales. The lawsuit points out that “The fame or reputation of the Navajo name and marks is such that, when [somebody uses similar marks] with its goods and services, a connection with the Navajo Nation is falsely presumed.”
Urban Outfitters had already weathered a storm in 2011 when it produced underwear and a hip flask that the Navajo Nation cited as being “derogatory and scandalous,” particularly in relation to alcohol which is banned from the Navajo (Dinee) Reservation.
The retailer has removed the products from its website after receiving of a cease-and-desist letter but items, particularly craft goods such as belts, bags, hats and boots are still being retailed through shops, according the lawyers for the Navajo Nation.
A spokesman for Urban Outfitters stated that “we interpret trends” and claims that the company will continue like “many other fashion brands” to explore the Native American inspired trend in T-shirts and other products.
When designing and choosing promotional clothing it’s tempting to call upon established themes and well-known or well-loved images to support a new brand or to call attention to a product, but it’s important to ensure that infringements of trademarks do not lead to negative publicity.
The excellent and exhaustive blog, Clothes on Film has taken its annual trip through just about every film that came out this year (and some that we’d never heard of but apparently premiered anyway) to look at what clothing tells us about character. It’s fascinating.
Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth both played with reality – Helena by sticking to it and wearing genuine vintage fur, while Colin insisted on not wearing a suit jacket underneath his overcoat because it made him too bulky to be a realistic King George VI. Russell Brand played Arthur Bach in suits tailored by Martin Greenfield in New York to included a wide range of fabrics and to look like Savile Row tailoring while meeting the demands of an active character on a film
set.
Several films this year also focus on masculinity, using the most traditional symbol, the plain white T-shirt as worn by Elvis Presley and James Dean and seen in Drive worn by Ryan Gosling and even by Captain America! So plain white T-shirts for men add to their sense of masculinity, but make women feel vulnerable because of the risk of underwear showing through. Putting male staff in white and women in grey, blue or black T-shirts can create an impression of gender balance.
On TV, Boardwalk Empire also used Martin Greenfield to dress its characters in 1920s style and this focus has been particularly important in giving the impression of authority, power and prestige – according to the designers, this has involved using ‘hard’ dressing such as starch, brilliant whites and matte neutrals like beige and hats. Baseball style or soft caps were saved for lower ranking characters while harder headwear like fedoras or boaters were worn by bosses. Hats functioned to reveal who had power. That’s something that businesses tend to forget – if you put somebody in a
baseball cap, they have no authority – so let senior staff go bare-headed or give them a hat with a harder profile that denotes power.
There’s a lot to learn from film … and smart companies will use a designer who has a finger on the pulse to ensure that staff uniforms convey some of these subtle messages that help boost business success and productivity.
It’s said that Brooks Brothers has dressed more American Presidents than any other clothing line, and this month it had a Scottish showcase in its Regent Street shop.
More than 300 fashionistas attended the event which featured knitwear, tweed, cashmere, ties, embroidered and embossed items and hand-made shirts. The occasion was the Harris Tweed centenary and Brooks Brothers used the event to highlight its own nearly two century pedigree, with photos of Abraham Lincoln (who got that black coat from the Brooks Brothers store), Andy Warhol and Clarke Gable, all dressed in Brooks Brother’s clothing.
It’s not just tweed that makes Brooks Brothers different – the brand has driven the search for new clothing fashions that it can import, such as bringing button-down shirts to the USA and inventing the wash and wear suit. Branding clothes with the classic Brooks Brothers logo has kept the company in the public mind as one that delivers a formal quality along with ease of wear and laundering and it has also been careful to supply clothes for TV shows that match its brand identity such as Mad Men and Glee.
This clever association of clothing, famous wearer and innovation has really driven the brand as one that innovates and yet contains the best of American heritage. Other companies might find a very different focus for their brands – more casual companies might like a figurehead who plays a cool sport to wear a sponsored polo shirt or to find a band or actor who typify the brand values and then to offer them promotional clothing to wear in public. Whatever way you play the famous clothing game, it benefits both brand and individual to be associated with each other.
Many companies, or even colleges, end up as brands. Laurie Essig, over at True Slant, is bemoaning the way the college she attended, Franklin and Marshall, has become one of the most wanted casual clothing brands in Europe and Japan, without the actual clothing line having anything to do with the college at all!
At the same time, HMV are hoping to turn around a declining market share by creating an ‘entertainment-inspired’ clothing range that launches in June. The line will feature rock and film imagery on music themed T-shirts aimed at the 18-30 male market and checked shirts and scarves for ‘festival-chic’ women. It’s the spearhead of a strategy that will move the company away from its traditional lines of CDs and DVDs into more ‘lifestyle’ sales.
So while your business might not seem to lend itself to establishing a strong clothing brand, it’s worth considering if the next Caterpillar boots trend or the rapidly building craze for cowboy hats could launch from, or help support, your business. There’s a current desire for retro style aprons which any catering or hardware company could tap into, by creating branded pinnys for sale. And skinny leg jeans are being supported by husky work shirts, which is a great chance for engineering and trade businesses to put their workforce into fashionable uniforms that can also be sold or given to clients as a goodwill gesture.
Companies evolve, but uniforms don’t always seem to evolve with them – the two ways that a company really marks itself out as having lost touch with the developing world of business are having an out of date logo and having an old-fashioned uniform.
Promotional clothing allows a business to relaunch itself and to slam out a powerful marketing campaign that reinforces an established customer base, attract trade and increases sales by reminding everybody why that firm been around so long and what keeps it ahead of the competition.
One way to demonstrate your evolution is to use retro uniform items to highlight how far you’ve come in the time you’ve been established. One computer company did this by celebrating 15 years in business, in 2008 by getting all their staff to wear 1993 clothing and playing the hits of that year as their call holding music for the first month of the year, as well as having their site teams wear specially printed T-shirts that used the titles of hit TV shows and songs of 1993 to refer to the company’s ‘long’ history. Well, it’s long in computer terms!
Campaigns like this can get local press coverage too, as people love to hear about the quirky ways that local companies are behaving.
We’ve all been given a baseball cap as a promotional gimmick or giveaway, and most of the time we don’t wear them. Why not?
Because they look too new
If you want a hat that is the summer equivalent of a biker’s leather jacket, you have to do a bit of work. Squeaky clean baseball caps are great for cute children and ladies, but most men want something that looks as if it has earned its place on their head. Obviously if you wear it a great deal it will eventually get that rough round the edges look, but if you want a vintage looking hat from new, then you can take some rough sandpaper to the seams and brim of the hat too take the edge of the newness. Then bury it overnight (yes really!) and wash it the next day in a good hot wash with some washing soda in it (remember to mark where you buried it though or you may lose it forever) and in just 24 hours you’ve got a hat that looks like its been worn all summer. Leaving your hat in the sun for a couple of days also helps to give it a weathered look.
Because they are flat billed
Some baseball caps are made flat-billed because they are easier to manufacture and ship, but if you want a classic curved brim, simply find a beer mug (the kind with a handle) dampen the brim and put it in the mug overnight. By next morning the hat will have a nice curve across the brim. Don’t do this when drunk, or you may put the bill in the mug the wrong way and end up with a hat that looks like it’s smiling.
It’s a stupid colour
This is the supplier’s fault and if your baseball cap is a promotional item then you can expect the company whose logo appears on the hat to disappear before too long – it’s a very stupid mistake to provide promotional clothing in colours that nobody wants to wear, even if that is the brand colour. Much better advice is to keep the logo in brand colours and to pick black, navy, red or white for the cap colour because those are the classic colourways that most people are happy to have on their heads.
It’s too big
If your cap is not adjustable, and it’s made of cotton, you can try shrinking it. First make it wet – if it has a plastic bill you can dip it in warm water, and then wring it out slightly before putting it on your head – wear it until it is completely dry. It will fit you like a glove.
There’s nothing like celebrity endorsement to get a business off the ground, although sometimes that can backfire, as Jamie Oliver is discovering: his new Brighton restaurant has been in the press twice this week – once because he apparently ‘stole’ a chef from Aldo Zilli, and now because a naked pregnant woman is picketing it for animal rights.
On the other hand Liam Gallagher has never been one to hide his light under a bushel and in establishing his own clothing line, he’s spoken out about clothes. On winklepicker shoes he says ‘You know them shoes that just come at you like a ****ing snooker cue! It’s like, leave it out man! You got a license for them bastards or what?’ and on celebrity clothing lines in general he’s equally forthright ‘I’m doing it cuz there’s a lack of stuff out there of the things I would wear …. I’m not into the skinny look. That’s what I’m here for, to ****ing get rid of that s***.’
So what does his line deliver, apart from the need to delete expletives when repeating his words on our blog? It’s called Pretty Green after the Jam song and, as you might expect, it has a mod feel to it: skinny jeans (although they aren’t skinny jeans, obviously because Liam’s not into that, as he’s said), some T-shirts that look quite retro and, of course, parkas.
And in case you thought this was a British phenomenon, Justin Timberlake has put his name to a tequila blend this month too.
The thing is, Liam’s clothing line and Justin’s tequila will sell to their fans, because that’s what fan means – being a fanatic about what your star does. But for the rest of us, a stronger focus on excellent products, value for money and superlative service are going to remain important – because that’s how our customers will become our fans too.
Embroidery is an ancient artistic technique that is still used today to make a piece of clothing more distinctive. Until the invention of screen printing, there were only two ways to get fabric to carry a message – it had to be either woven in as tapestry or embroidered on with thread, and modern embroidery contains a range of high technology methods and materials to allow the embroidery machine to create intricate patterns that seem three-dimensional, complex writing that can mimic anybody’s handwriting, or detailed images with subtle shading and textures.
Embroidery has a wide range of uses from the creation of elegant logos in metallic thread which give a touch of high style to company uniforms, especially those used in hotel and spa environments, through to bright three-dimensional blocks of colour that make up a company’s logo and stand out against a dark blue or black T-shirt or barkeeper’s apron – both these techniques have particular use in situations like bars, restaurants and other locations that are often low-lit.
Embroidery is also useful in creating promotional clothing for company events as it can conveys information but also gives an air of luxury and classic styling to any clothing, but especially on shirts, blouses and corporate clothing. The scale of embroidery is usually intricate and detailed, which makes it particularly suitable for monograms on cuffs and collars or on bathrobes or caps.
In ‘bespoke’ businesses, those that have a low staff turnover and a reputation of style and luxury to live up to, have names ‘detailed’ which means embroidered on the clothing, looks classic and understated and gives a much better impression than a name badge. If that seems out of your cost range, you can consider embroidery patches which can be made up in bulk and then sewn onto suitable garments or bags or other merchandise. It’s a highly personalised approach that is popular with customers because it looks rich and elegant.
If promotional clothing does its job, it will become an heirloom – vintage T-shirts, retro fashion boiler suits and dresses, previously loved ties and bags, all these are desirable but fragile items. Modern promotional clothing may become the much-desired heirloom of the future, and knowing how to care for it can help you and your team enjoy your custom printed or embroidered work-wear, your team T-shirts or your on-tour hoodies. 
