Wednesday, April 17, 2019
How Tiffany & Co. Trademarked “Tiffany Blue”
Artsy: In the early 1990s, color went to court. The Chicago-based company Qualitex, which produces green-gold press pads for dry-cleaning plants, sued St. Louis’s Jacobson Products for making the same items in the same hue. The case made it to the Supreme Court, and in his opinion that favored Qualitex, who ultimately won the case, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: “Color alone, at least sometimes, can meet the basic legal requirements for use as a trademark. It can act as a symbol that distinguishes a firm’s goods and identifies their source, without serving any other significant function.”
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My mom is a copyright and intellectual property law attorney and so I’ve always had a little extra insight into copyrights from her so I was very intrigued to see this article. It is super interesting to read about how color can be trademarked. I am a little confused by this though because I feel like that is trademarking a word in the English language. Also, what is the reality of monitoring this trademark? Do Tiffany and Co. have a group of attorneys going around making sure this color doesn’t exist in people’s photographs, paintings and other pieces of art? It seems that regulating a color is a lot of work for something that I really don’t know how much it matters to the Tiffany brand. I am even more surprised to read about other companies such as UPS and Cadbury have tried with varying success to trademark other colors. I classify Tiffany trademarking a color with the same amount of craziness when pop stars were trying to trademark three-word phrases from songs. Something that I really liked about this article was reading about the history of Tiffany Blue and the artistic history of the company.
I’m a little confused by the ability to patent a color. Does this mean that no one else can use the 1837 Blue commercially or just in life in general? Is this a creative patent or a patent of intellectual property? Does Tiffany own the color? How can someone own a color? It seems strange considering they didn’t create the color. It already existed and they named and claimed it. Beyond that, it is incredible how a company became synonymous with a color. Anytime you hear about a “little blue box”, you immediately know that it’s from Tiffany’s. There’s no need to clarify which blue box because the blue box is a Tiffany staple. Today, Tiffany is still a sign of luxury, and so is the turquoise color. I can say without a doubt that if someone gave me a blue bag I would know without reading any label that it was from Tiffany’s.
Tiffany blue has been a color I could recognize for as long as I can remember. I always associate it with the heart-shaped pendent with the “Return to Tiffany” text that all my friends began to want in Middle School. I feel like it’s a reflex for me to say, “Tiffany blue” and I had not previously known how the company actually trademarked the color. While I think this is an excellent marketing strategy for them, I don’t think every corporation has that strong of an association with a hue. The article lists a few other companies that are trying to go through the same process of trademarking, but to various degrees of success. Some brands are more iconically represented with a sound effect or a short jingle. Regardless, when businesses find a marketing strategy that allows them to prominently differentiate their products from others, it provides a strong way to make themselves instantly recognizable.
The first time I learned that companies could own and legally protect a color was when I was 7. I found out about Barbie Pink. Funny enough, even still today I can’t wrap my head around this whole concept of owning a color as a corporation, and this makes learning about it even more interesting for me. I had no idea that so many other corporations also trademarked colors. How do they know if people are using them, especially when colors like Tiffany Blue are so popular in modern designs? I think it is really striking how Tiffiny was able to latch on to this specific shade and make it a symbol of their company so early on. It truly is iconic and recognizable, but this is perhaps even still an understatement especially given how long it has been around. I commend them for sticking to their brand for so many decades while still keeping its prominence amongst people.
I think that a company’s ability to copyright a color has always been something that is interesting to me in some cases like Tiffany’s I think it makes a lot of sense and then in other cases like Fedex I’m more like you really felt the need to want to copyright the color brown? It also makes me wonder about how close colors can be before you infringe on copyright territory because it could potentially allow another company to use you color recognition for their own benefit. Like if another jewelry company used a more green-blue than Tiffany’s how far away from tiffany Blue would they need to be before they were infringing on copyright laws> I feel like part of my interest in the copyrighting of color comes down to how people see colors and I believe there is a recognition that different people see color differently so a color that can clearly be differentiated might depend on the person looking at it which I imagine could get messy.
Before reading this article, I was not fully aware of the fact that companies could legally own and patent literal colors, as a way to distinguish their brand, I just simply figured they used the color the way that they did, but that it was just a color. Adding the legality aspect to it makes sure that others cannot make knock offs of their brand, which is good, but in reality, knock offs are always a bit different than the original anyway, and they could just go one level in hue down from the patented Tiffany Blue, and I doubt anyone would notice. I understand the concept of wanting to protect your brand, but in general it kind of seems like a waste of money and time to go through all that work for little to no reason, in the grand scheme of things. In general, I understand why companies feel the need to do this, but it seems unnecessary.
Tiffany blue is such an iconic image to me and at one point I asked my parents exactly how someone could make a color theirs and only theirs. I didn’t quite get a clear answer, but I think a big part of that is the intricacies of copyright and intellectual property law are really challenging unless you have some kind of exposure to it and that discourse group for a while. I didn’t know how many companies had pursued this path until I read this article, and, the more that I think about it, it actually makes sense. So much of our memory is tied to color, and seeing one color tied to one company consistently is really effective. It is amazing how concrete the association between the color and their brand’s impact (sophistication, femininity, luxury). Something that really struck me was the quote from Davey about the color signifies something recognizable, rare, and enviable without any other branding.
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