Strong Brand Case Study: Slutty Vegan

Happy Valentine’s Day and welcome back to another episode of the Own Your Genius podcast. I pray that no matter what your relationship status is, that you know that you are loved and that you are valued. So last week we discussed what it takes to have a strong brand. It starts with a comprehensive clearance search and requires early registration, vigilant enforcement, and consistency in how you present your brand to the market. Today we’re going to set one brand that started small to explore what their trademark journey. But before we dive into this case study, make sure that you’re subscribed to this podcast, so you don’t miss any insights into how to own your genius.  

Welcome back to the Own Your Genius podcast where we discuss building businesses, growing brands and what else? Only your genius. I’m your host, Attorney LaConya Murray, owner of Off The Mark IP Solutions. Off the Mark is a boutique intellectual property firm representing innovative entrepreneurs aka geniuses who are looking to protect their brand and grow their business with ongoing legal support and business mentorship. We have a good one for you today, so let’s get started. 

Two weeks ago, Pinky Cole shared this on IG. It’s a screenshot of an email letting her know that her trademark application for Your Mind is Currency has been approved for publication. The post was captioned, “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but trademark everything.” And it’s no secret that the owner of the highly popular and highly successful vegan restaurant, Slutty Vegan, believes in protecting her brand. In an interview with Earn Your Leisure, that she did, maybe sometime last year, she told the host that before her brand was a big deal, she met with an attorney to identify her intellectual property. She wanted to determine exactly what could be protected and how it could be protected. Then she proceeded to register every part of her brand. Slutty Vegan launched in October of 2018 and it has 24 registered trademarks and 12 pending trademark applications. But Pinky Co, she didn’t start registering everything at once. She told y’all during that interview that this process is expensive. So instead of trying to do everything at once, she started building her intellectual property portfolio by making sure the brand’s name was protected. She did that in September of 2018 before she launched the brand, which was, like I said, launched in 2018. Then a few months later in 2019, she applied to register the brand’s logo. Then she began protecting the brand’s unique menu item names, along with the promotional merchandise that they had. She started that around 2020. Then as the brand began to grow and expand into grocery store items, Pinky Cole, she made sure that the brand protection was also extended to protect those uses.  

Registration for those new uses, just so you can remember, is necessary in protecting your brand because federal trademark protection is limited to how you state it you will use that trademark in your application. In this case, the original application was for food and drinks, beverages, and it included providing food and drinks via mobile truck. So that was what the application was for. And then the next Slutty Vegan application was for apparel, which protected the brand’s promotional merch. And then the next application, so now we’re on the third Slutty Vegan application. And that third application included four uses. I’m assuming by this time she had a better idea, and she had a better vision or a clearer vision for what the brand was going to do. It included a mobile app for ordering vegan food and cell phone cases. That was one use. A second use was for backpacks composed of vegan material. There was a third use for sandwiches composed of significant part of vegan ingredients. And then the fourth use for that third application was promoting public awareness of the benefits of plant-based diets by means of public advocacy. And then also an online retail store featuring giftware and gift cards and clothing and accessories composed of vegan material. Four uses in that third application. So, that’s six uses over the three applications. That’s good. The brand grew, she extended the protection.  

Now, because of the brand success, because of the success of Slutty Vegan, it had an effect or domino effect. I don’t know how you really want to say it, but because of that Slutty Vegan brand success, Pinky Cole’s personal brand grew also. As a result, she formed a charitable foundation to give back to the community. And she also formed a company that hosts events that brings entrepreneurs, creatives, and celebrities together to build, she says, billion-dollar ideas. And the foundation, the non-profit foundation has three registered trademarks, and they were filed after the foundation was formed. And then the company, the one that hosts American Sheesh, that’s the event that she created, it has three pending trademark application. And the trademark application for the company’s signature event, the American Sheesh, it was filed prior to the launch of the event. So now that we have kind of taken an overview, Pinky Cole, Slutty Vegan, and the whole trademark journey.  

Let’s talk about what we can learn as business owners from that. But before we do, I want to let you know that this episode of the Only Genius podcast is brought to you by the Genius Insider. The Genius Insider is Off the Mark’s legal subscription program that offers its members access to free consultations, free document review, and discounts on legal services such as trademark registration. If you are interested in learning more, make sure that you go to geniusinsider.co – That’s geniusinsider.co to learn more. And we’ll also drop the link in the show notes. Back to the business at hand. Now as business owners, I think that we can take several things from this case study. The first thing we’re going to take is to register early. Your brand doesn’t have to be where you envision it will be before you apply for trademark registration.  

If you have goals of your brand being a big deal and you know in your heart, it will be you need to identify your intellectual property, develop a strategy to protect it, and then start executing that plan. And that brings me to the second point that we can take away from the Pinky Cove case study, which is you don’t have to do it all at once. If you don’t have the budget to register your brand name, your logo, your taglines, and any other trademarks that you have identified, you can’t do that all at once, start with the brand name and go from there. That’s what Ms. Cole did. She filed the Slutty Vegan trademark in 2018, and then the Slutty Vegan logo trademark a few months later in 2019. And now by this time, her brand is starting to make money and she’s able to protect the menu item names in 2020 and all the other things that she’s done. And the third lesson that we’ve gotten from this case study is as our brands grow and as they expand, our trademark protection should expand as well. 

Slutty Vegan started out as a restaurant and a mobile food truck service, and it ended up in grocery stores with its own brand of bacon and spinach dip. These uses, those last two uses, the bacon and the spinach dip, weren’t protected by the original trademark, so a new application was filed. Don’t be afraid to invest in protecting your brand as it grows. The fourth lesson is that consistency really works. Slutty Vegan stayed true to its brand by giving its menu items, kind of like sexual related names like the menage a toile, the side chick and one night stand for sandwiches. And that’s one of the things that we talked about in the last episode is staying consistent, making sure that you stay on brand. That brings us to the end of today’s episode on the Slutty Vegan case study. What are your takeaways from this case study? If you found today’s episode insightful, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review. 

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