Oh, yes, I know that the price of being a Big Consumer Goods Company is eternal vigilance. It can't be easy having to be always on the lookout for imposter goods made on the cheap and sold at flea markets. The bigs argue that knock-off wares deprive them of revenue. In some cases - pirated videos and software - they've got a point. But it's hard to believe that someone who's buying a $10 "Vuitton bag" off a card table at The Flea does so instead of going into a Vuitton store and forking over $700 for the real deal. More plausibly - sorta - the bigs can argue that their brand is being impugned by shoddy goods bearing their name. But is the Vuitton brand really harmed when some gum-chewing big-hair girl whines about the cute pocketbook that fell apart in the rain?
Which brings me to The North Face, which is now up in fleece-covered arms over something that's not a direct knock-off of its product line, but, rather, a take-off on it.
The North Face - outdoor gear and the way-pricey, way-popular with the teens fleece jacket - is suing The South Butt for it
s send-up of their name, logo, and tagline. The South Butt is the brainchild of 
an 18 year old college kid, Jimmy Winkelmann, who dreamed his dream up to help pay for college. Clearly a rip off, as is the South Butt tagline - Never Stop Relaxing (vs. NF's Never Stop Exploring - which I guess includes never stop exploring ways to develop a high end, high price brand that young folks - at least for now - are clamoring for).
I don't exactly find The South Butt take-off HI-lariously funny. (Ha-ha, butt, ha-ha.) It's a bit too Beavis and Butthead-ish for my taste. But Jimmy Winkelmann is not interested in selling anything to me. He's interested in selling to those among his peers who find the dig at North Face - and brand consciousness, consumer madness, and conformity (other than their own!) - HI-lariously funny.
Winkelmann's merch, by the way, ain't all that cheap. A fleece jacket - in ghastly mint green - costs $60. (Less than what I take to be its opposite NF number, which costs $165, but is, realistically, likely to be somewhat better made. Just a guess.)
But I don't see how anyone would mistake anything from The North Face for anything from The South Butt.
Left alone, The South Butt joke would likely have run its course, and its hard to believe that it does one iota of harm to The North Face.
What the suit does is bring more attention and, I'm guessing, a lot more in sales, to The South Butt.
And also makes The North Face - which has always had something of a ruggedly handsome, fresh air, wholesome image - look like a humorless bully. (The humorless may be dead-on. They use the word "amongst" on their website.) Whatever the legal and financial outcome - NF buys out SB, SB slapped with a cease and desist - Goliath never comes out of a David and Goliath suit without a slingshot blast to their image. No, Goliath doesn't end up dead. Just dinged up.
And David?
He makes enough to pay his tuition, gets his bit of fame, finds a job with a company that admires his initiative and humor, or starts up another company. Hard to believe there'll be any damages awarded to North Face, unless Winkelmann shows up in court as an arrogant, smug, punk, rather than an earnest goofball.
I'm betting on the goofball, and doff my cap to a kid who came up with a fun idea to help put himself through college, and is no doub learning plenty about business in the process. By the way, the cap I'll doff is the dark pink North Face ski cap I bought last year during a brutal cold snap. And, yes, it does keep my ears very warm.
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