So, let’s say you’re a tiny Vermont-based company that wants to print and sell t-shirts that encourage kale consumption. Whoops! You’ve been engaged in a massive trademark battle by a huge fast food chain with 1,800 US locations! Wait, what?
That was the scenario Bo Muller-Moore’s Eat More Kale found itself in three years ago. A lot of you are running ahead of this story and already seeing the problem: the name of the company, which doubles as one of the primary slogans on the t-shirts it produces, is somewhat similar to Chick-Fil-A’s “Eat Mor Chikin” (aka “the dumbest fucking slogan in Fast Food, which is saying something). Except, not really. “Eat More _______” is a pretty damn generic expression. It’d be one thing if Muller-Moore’s shirts said “Eat Mor Kayl” or something, but Chick-Fil-A doesn’t get to trademark the very concept of increased consumption of literally any product in existence. That’d be like trademarking the phrase “Ice Cream is Awesome.” Then again, we already knew Chick-Fil-A were a bunch of raging, infected assholes, so this isn’t shocking.