Is Food in Jars' logo being ripped off?
An online entrepreneur seems to have borrowed her image.
One of Philly's best-known food bloggers says a T-shirt company is ripping off her logo.
Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars got her then-coworker Roger Estes to design her logo - a jar with script writing - back in late 2010.
She says she paid him 24 half-pint jars of assorted jam, which he gave to friends and family as holiday gifts.
Now a vendor on the popular sales site Skreened.com is selling T-shirts with the logo. McClellan says the vendor, identified on the site only as Easy Does It, swiped the logo from Estes' website. She says she is certain of this because he or she also appropriated another image from Estes' site. The shirts have been sold in assorted colors; it's now available only in blue.
A rep of the Ohio-based Skreened declined to identify Easy Does It. He wrote that Skreened "explicitly and contractually" prohibits users from using the site to sell merchandise that "infringes third party intellectual property rights (this includes copyright, trademark, trade dress and right of publicity)."
McClellan said she reached out to Skreened in March, and the company wrote back, saying she'd need to provide "significant documentation" proving that she owned the logo. Because she had paid Estes in jam, not cash, she didn't have any such documentation beyond the fact that it's her URL, her book name and her Facebook page. "I did briefly consult a lawyer, but didn't have the money to pursue it," she told me. "Then I got lost in my book launch and didn't have the time."
Update (10:40 a.m.): Skreened says the images will come down.
Image: McClellan's logo at left, Easy Does It's T-shirt at right