A company calling itself Pan Am is selling reproductions of the old flight bags, as well as other accessories and clothing. I don’t know what, if any, connection they have to the defunct airline.
The transcript is online. Apparently, if a company isn’t using a trademark, then someone else can use it:
So basically he found out from Kellogg’s that they weren’t making Hydrox, that it had been discontinued, then he sent it in to the US Trademark Office saying he wants to use the trademark, and sent paperwork to Kellogg’s attorneys. Kellogg’s never replied, and after a year the Tradmark office said he could use it.
I’d wondered about the name too, they also address that in the podcast:
It was a name that made more sense at the time, and not as much anymore. There are apparently some big fans of the original Hydrox that would be excited for it to come back, but I’d be surprised if many new people became fans. It is available on Amazon, and he’s trying to get it into stores.
Also, the podcast mentions a site where you can search if trademarks are live or dead, I don’t see the URL mentioned, but I’m guessing it’s this site.
Man, that dead brand has changed hands quite a few times in 100 years! And like the guitar brands I named upthread, the buyouts have been a combination of the new owners actually trying to revive Indian models, and simply branding their own models with the Indian name.
An Indian showroom opened up here in downtown SLC a few years ago…literally right next door to the Harley-Davidson dealership.
They put you under in 1953, and you want to challenge them now that they’ve had six more decades to build their brand into ubiquity. Riiiiiight. :smack:
It went about as well as you might expect, and the dealership is now mixed-use office space…with the Indian branding still on the outside of the structure. So now people have offices at “the Indian building.”
Not anymore 
Seriously, Oreos simply tasted better than Hydrox. There was a good reason Hydrox ended up in the dustbin, and Oreo didn’t.
Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?
The current owners of Abercrombie and Fitch bought the name from the original owners.
Do dead brand names have any value? I think everything is worth whatever someone else is willing to pay the owner for.
I wonder if they are connected with Pan Am Railways. They bought the Pan Am name a while ago ( They were Guilford until 2006).
Ig so, it was (at least initially) a separate purchase - Studebaker sold the Avanti operation (fiberglass body) and retained the rest of the line.
Only the 61 and 62
Avantis were Stude’s (IIRC).
Both the new Avanti company and Studebaker were running after that.
The only thing Studebaker had going for it by the 50’s was a brilliant designer - not only the Avanti, but the 1957-58 Golden and Silver Hawks are superb stylings.
Shopsmith makes woodworking tools. The current iteration makes no bones about how it’s not responsible for the early units produced after WWII and any Sears branded machines.
That’s an interesting case…the old A & F was a dept. store catering to the old money crowd. The present firm sells overpriced sportswear to the teenager market, using attractive photos of nekkid kids.
What’s really amazing is when a Brand or even just a historical name is bought or at least used in a business simply to invoke heritage that doesn’t exist. Guitar brand names like Recording King (an old Montgomery Ward brand that was sometimes made by Gibson), Maurer (a really obscure old brand), Loar (named after Lloyd Loar the guy whose instrument designs brought Gibson into the modern era) and even D’Angelico (single NY luthier known for legendary handmade archtops) - have all been put to work in recent years.
After Studebaker picked up and ran to Canada, Avanti got passed around more than a $5 hooker on a Saturday night. Here’s a wee bit of the history of the brand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_cars_(non-Studebaker)
Interesting side tidbit - the Newman and Altman families who were the first purchasers post-Stude, produced modern-day NASCAR driver, Ryan Newman, who is the grandson of Leo Newman.
Schlitz never killed anyone, at least not directly.
The decline and fall of Schlitz was caused by letting the accountants take over and implement every penny-saving idea they could imagine. The quality of the beer turned to shit and people stopped buying it, especially after one “innovation” caused floatie bits, leading to a recall of ~10 million bottles of beer.
Trademarks (such as brand names) need to be *used *by their owners in order to maintain rights to them. If they remain unused for a long enough time (three years?), they are considered abandoned, and enter the public domain. At that point, they have zero monetary value in terms of being able to sell them, but certainly may retain marketing value for anyone choosing to use them.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that abandonment is a fuzzy concept and frequently requires a judge’s ruling to decide if it has occurred or not.
Of course they do. Why else would you find Westinghouse or RCA TVs in stores when those companies died years ago?
The Studebaker story is mostly a story of bad management. They paid big money for dividends and the best labor contracts in the industry, but wouldn’t spend money to update a horribly out of date plant in South Bend. When a perfect storm of a poorly received design/end of Korean War contracts/all out price war between Ford and GM happened in the mid-50s, their business collapsed. Outside of a year or two after the introduction of the Lark, they lost money and lost it big for the next decade.
If Westinghouse died years ago, then why is there a huge Westinghouse power plant in Newington, NH that is still active?
They’re just licensing the brand name from CBS. When the original Westinghouse merged with CBS, they ended up selling the non-broadcasting businesses.