Third Culture Bakery Celebrates Loss Of ‘Mochi Muffin’ Trademark With Giveaway
This will be a short one, but the reputation rehab project for Third Culture Bakery has begun. If you don't recall that name, it's a baker business in California that somehow convinced the USPTO to issue it a trademark for mochi muffin. Mochi is a rice paste popular in Japan for making small baked goods and other foods. A mochi muffin is just that: a muffin made of mochi. It is, therefore, purely descriptive to call your product a mochi muffin. The sort of thing, in other words, that you're not supposed to be able to trademark.
But the USPTO approved the mark and Third Culture began issuing legal threats and lawsuits against others that dared to use the descriptive term for their own products. The public backlash got so bad that eventually Third Culture relented and said it would relinquish the trademark and stop the bullying.
And now it has, or will at the end of the month. And, in a bit of an attempt at reputation rebuilding, Third Culture will be celebrating its own loss of the trademark with a mochi muffin giveaway.
On Monday the company took to Instagram to hype Un-Trademark Day" celebrating the surrender of the mochi muffin trademark. On September 30, fans can visit any of the shops for a no-purchase necessary mochi muffin. The company's announcement, the post reads, comes as the owners learned of the completion of a Surrender of Registration for Cancelation on the morning of September 26. Legally speaking, the trademark will phase out in the coming weeks.
Frankly, as annoying as the bakery was about all of this at the onset, this reverse-heel-turn isn't a bad way to go about it. Instead of hiding from the whole issue, the company literally announced an Un-Trademark Day." That's a bit of self-deprecation that can frankly go a long way to rebuilding public goodwill. Free muffins don't hurt, either.
The post notes that they got some bad advice, and are trying to make up for it:
The post, signed by owners Sam Butarbutar and Wenter Shyu, goes on to explain a bit more of the reasoning behind trademarking in the first place. We originally were advised to try and obtain the trademark in 2017 to protect our teeny-tiny company from our very own wholesale accounts," the post reads. And have since taken and followed some bad advice that ultimately did more harm than good...We take full responsibility for this."
While blaming the bad advice" may feel a little like a cop-out, it's a bakery, not a bunch of trademark experts, and they certainly seem to be doing everything to make things right now.
The saga of the mochi muffin trademark is, at long last, over. And... if you happen to be near one of their California Bay Area stores tomorrow, go get a muffin.