The Original Zippalope, Starburst Fold and Pop-up Mailers
It is almost 200 years since Charles Caleb Colton wrote Lacon, volume I, no. 183 containing the famous quotation “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. The saying still holds true though today’s blog deals with instances where “passing off” might be a better description than “imitation”. The law of “passing off” is designed to prevent misrepresentation in the course of trade to the public. It is is a form of intellectual property enforcement against the unauthorised use of a mark which is considered to be similar to another party’s registered or unregistered trade marks.
However, sometimes it seems that one man’s intellectual property is another man’s generic term. It is some three years since we registered the domain name of “pop-up mailers” for our main website. At the time we wanted a name that described our core product in simple terms but we also wanted a term that wasn’t in common use. A Google search for “pop-up mailers” in 2007 produced “no results”. Though the term will never become a proprietary eponym, the domain name has since been registered with several different suffixes by those whose role in life seems to be to follow and to copy. If that is the path that they choose, then, as they say in the States, “Eat our dust!”
Other names are similarly adopted by others, often quite innocently. One such instance is the case of an ancient Chinese folding mechanism that is seen in many commercial guises these days. Some time ago, we adopted the fold as the basis of a small range of products that are featured on our website but before marketing them we thought that we better give a name to the seemingly anonymous folding style. After some deliberation we came up with the name of the “Starburst” fold. This would now appear to have become the name for that fold and the term “Starburst” fold is now commonly used in the print industry and amongst paper crafters.
Some years ago we devised a simple style of mailing pack for our automatic pop-ups which incorporated a tear-off strip which ran down the centre of the pack. Hardly original as a concept but at the time it was totally new to the promotional pop-ups market. It looked like an envelope with a zip and so we called the pack a Zippalope. Many others thought that this was a good idea so they did the same.
If you are in business and you are on the ball you will be totally aware of your competitors and how they operate. Most will co-exist quite happily but some will employ underhand methods. From my point of view, I am quite happy to have one or two competitors hanging on to our coat tails, for as long as they do so, they will always be behind us. However, I find it totally disappointing that an industry that is based on invention and new ideas should be populated by some who cannot even come up with an original name for a simple pop-up ball, for example.
In the mean time, we will continue to have new ideas not only for ourselves but also for others to copy and we will continue to invent generic terms for the pop-up industry. From a personal point of view, I have to say that it would bore me shitless if the only ideas that I ever had were always someone else’s.