According to the latest report of Beijing Youth Daily on November 4, because Japan's MUJI guided consumers to mistake the "MUJI" towels and quilts under Beijing Cotton Field Company as copycat goods, it denigrated its goodwill. The Chinese company took Muji to court. The court finally ruled that MUJI constituted commercial defamation and should compensate the Chinese enterprise 400,000 yuan.
It is reported that in April this year, Japan's MUJI issued a statement emphasizing that the company's MUJI goods have long been registered in Japan in 1980, and then applied for the registration of this trademark around the world, even in the Chinese market, only towels, quilts and other goods have been "preemptively registered" trademarks by other companies, and other categories of goods have applied for MUJI trademarks.
In fact, as early as 2001, the trademark of Beijing Muji had been successfully registered, and after several twists and turns, it finally fell into the hands of Beijing Cotton Field Company. However, at that time, the brand of Muji in Japan was not well known in the Chinese market, and cotton field company has been using this trademark, and has won industry awards many times, with a certain degree of popularity.
Japan's MUJI only entered the Chinese market for the first time in 2005, and there is no way to register the "MUJI" trademark in towels, quilts and other categories, and finally retreated to the second place and chose to register the English trademark "muji". Therefore, it is difficult to say that the Chinese company deliberately preemptively registered this trademark.
It is worth mentioning that the trademark dispute of large companies is also very normal, and many companies will not hesitate to spend money to buy out trademarks in order to make their own brands independent. Few people know that in 2004, Hanwang Technology also registered a trademark i-phone, which is very similar to Apple's iPhone, and eventually Apple spent $3.65 million to buy out the trademark.
In addition, Apple has bought the "iPad" trademark for $60 million from the Chinese company Proview. It can be said that if Japan's MUJI is not willing to spend money, the two MUJI may continue to be entangled.
Text | Lu Jiamin title | Lin Jia Figure | Lu Wenxiang | Lin Jia