Foreign Success: Case Study
The Problem
A hopping Chicago jazz and blues bar doesn’t exactly come to mind when people think about intellectual property, but that’s where we met one of our most prolific trademark clients.
This Illinois-based food company has for years in the United States produced numerous food, drink, and frozen-treat-style products.
Their portfolio included numerous brands, all of which were (by that time) household names throughout middle America.
If you visit a middle America grocery store with a frozen section, you’ll more than likely see this company’s products.
But that night in 2007, that food company’s representative had other things on her mind.
She enjoyed the club’s food, drink, and music, but had a significant problem.
She had just become the new trademark manager within that food company and was told to manage an extensive Canadian trademark portfolio as well as their existing American portfolio.
Her problem was that she had no one in Canada whom she could trust to readily take on that portfolio, which today has some 50-plus registered trademarks.
What would be the odds that she could meet a Canadian registered trademark agent in a Chicago nightclub?
The Solution
Within a few days of our meeting, we took some basic emergency steps to become agent of record on that company’s existing applications and registrations.
Next, we took on the bigger challenge of sorting their American brands from their Canadian brands and creating a table of concordance between their internal corporate identification system and the identification system used by the Canadian Trademarks Office.
Within a few months, their existing portfolio had been updated and recorded at the Canadian Trademarks Office, and we then started tracking new brands as they emerged from within the company.
The Outcome
Today, this company enjoys an extensive and low-maintenance registered trademark portfolio in Canada, while their numerous products continue to sell on Canadian grocery store shelves.
As an added bonus, they are able to track their costs in USD instead of CAD, without having to worry about currency conversions – something their accounting department was really happy about, and something that we were happy to arrange.
Contact Pnc IP Group today to learn more about our Trademark services.