Categories
History

#KeepCalmandCarryon Statement from @yesnomaybeltd

We join their blogpost part-way through:

When we discovered that keepcalm&carryon.com had been snapped up and was trading we checked it out and was disturbed to find a site that looked VERY similar to ours.

I also saw colour choices for prints and T shirts had been copied and our suppliers too! The product was virtually indistinguishable to ours.

Then we delved deeper and found that the Terms and conditions on their site had the same spelling mistakes that I had made in ours!

I tried sending them an email requesting they stop it and generate some new ideas – though when I was told to where stick it, I realised that the flipside of using the print without any Copyright (which legal counsel had told me was impossible) was that everyone else was perfectly welcome to also. I wanted to Sue Marc Cooper for Passing off, as I felt like he was capitalizing on the hard work and marketing I had been doing until he started – but it would be hard to prove how many sales I actually lost from people looking for a YNM Keep Calm T they had seen – on a celebrity, or a stranger in the street even – we had sold thousands before the competition existed. Fact.

And that’s business, you say. Fair enough. All our other prints are licensed from designers or artists, and we would sue if somebody copied them.

So the ‘Keep Calm situation simply became: outperform the competition. Great! I mean – frustrating, but that’s business – It meant our Keep Calm collection had to sell at a more competitive price than the rest of our range, and we had to invent interesting new twists: Nail stud prints, a Halloween edition, and of course all carry the Yes No Maybe brand logo on the neck and woven label at the bottom. For authenticity – So they can be identified as a YNM original.

That’s how we can spot Rupert Grint at a Harry Potter premiere in one of ours and Katie Price wearing one of ours in the tabloids

Marc Cooper on the News was ridiculous. He really did come across as the bad guy.

The fact is, he was not responsible for popularising the slogan. He is just part of a larger group of people (also with families and “interests” to support) who profit in one way or another from this Meme that captured the mood of the nation.

Read the full blog post.

By Second World War Posters

Mass Communications Academic, @MMUBS. British Home Front Propaganda posters as researched for a PhD completed 2004. In 1997, unwittingly wrote the first history of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, which she now follows with interest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.