There’s a nice little corporate rumble to keep you eye on that pits two brands that could not be more extremely different.
Fighting out of the blue corner, from Bentonville, Arkansa, the corporate, retail behemoth Walmart.
And fighting out of the red corner, hailing from Chicago, via Wyoming and Los Angeles, Kanye West.
The battle is over Yeezy’s new logo design West came up for over a year ago and has filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
West describes his new logo as “rays from a sun,” and Walmart feels it looks a little bit too much like their-13-year old logo that is a sun.
Are there similarities? I guess so, but Kanye’s logo is made out of dots, and the Walmart logo is constructed with yellow lines.
You could make the argument the new Yeezy logo looks more like a snowflake than a sun, but we’ll leave that up to the highly-paid lawyers to fight out.
Kanye said his new logo might be used everywhere you see the Yeezy brand, and that includes underwear, sneakers, T-shirts, modular homes and furniture.
Here’s Walmart’s beef; they say it will create confusion, and a “false suggestion of a connection” between Walmart and Yeezy.
Umm, I don’t know anyone who thinks Yeezy and Walmart had anything in common. It’s like Waffle House thinking the Mastros logo is too similar because an M looks like an upside down W.
Here’s what I do know; Walmart employee 155 full-time attorneys, and they generally win their battles. But Kanye West doesn’t back down from many fights, so this should be fun to watch.
It sounds like Walmart has tried to settle things peacefully, as this letter they sent to the Yeezy legal team seems to imply. “As we referenced in our correspondence in July and August of 2020, January and February of 2021 and our telephone conference in March of 2021, Walmart has repeatedly sought to understand Yeezy’s planned use of the Yeezy Application, with the goal of finding ways in which the Walmart Spark Design and the Yeezy Application can co-exist with one another. However, to date, we have not received any conclusive information from Yeezy regarding the planned use or any cooperation from Yeezy in order to find common ground.”
Televise the trial! This could be fun.
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