I can’t say I’d really thought about it much before this discussion, but if there’d ever been any reason to ask myself, “does Wal-Mart own a whole bunch of factories?” I’d have answered myself, “well of course not.” Their business is retail.
It’s really the perfect Wal-Mart store brand name - it conveys the notion that their stuff is equally good as the name brands. And since theirs is cheaper, it doesn’t need to be better, it just needs to be as good.
In this case. “Women Owned” isn’t (directly) a claim about the product. The term is a trade mark. Trademark Status & Document Retrieval,
The trademark is owned by these people: Certification for Women-Owned Businesses - WBENC.org : WBENC
WBENC owns the trade mark just as Disney owns the Mickey Mouse trademark. Just like Disney, WBENC can license its trademark to whoever they want on whatever terms they want. The users are held only to the standards the trademark owner sets. WBENC’s standards say they will only license businesses to use its “Women Owned” wordmark if women own 51% of the relevant business. Apparently, WBENC considers the manufacturer of the product to be the relevant business even if they are selling the product under another brand.
WBENC could, if they so chose, license companies to use the trademark if they were 25% women owned, or whatever other percentage they chose.
What if WBENC wanted to license companies that weren’t actually owned by women but whose exclusively men owners promised that maybe someday they would let some hypothetical woman buy a share someday? WBENC could choose to let such a company use then “Women Owned” mark but they probably wouldn’t. If they allowed their licensing scheme to be that permissive and for the mark to become essentially meaningless, their federal trademark registration could be cancelled for being deceptively misdescriptive. I’m sure that WBENC feels that 51% woman ownership is defensible.
It’s germane in that it’s the law that specifies the conditions under which the manufacturer must appear. Wal-Mart has met those very limited conditions.
I would think that Wal-Mart has very good lawyers and therefore the label doesn’t contain a single word more or less than is legally required–except for those things that they perceive as a marketing benefit.
It should be noted that the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act is intended to provide a certain minimum amount of information so that consumers know what they’re getting. Basic things like the weight of the contents in a standardized form. Separate laws address fraudulent claims. “WOMEN-OWNED” isn’t fraudulent, and also isn’t something addressed by the FPLA. So there are no additional requirements there.
Oh gimme a break. You specified a condition that it met. That condition wasn’t relevant.
Now you’re saying there are no other requirements. Well OK then.
It may not meet the legal definition of ‘fraudulent,’ but by not mentioning any other entity besides Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., or the Equate brand, it strongly implied that one of those entities was “WOMEN OWNED”. (No hyphen, if you’re gonna nitpick.) Hence this thread. One shouldn’t have to do outside research to find out that the “WOMEN OWNED” claim was accurate only when applied to an entity not named on the label.
So yeah, in an everyday colloquial sense, I’d call that label fraudulent.
Good for them. Now tell me, what statement does the Mickey Mouse trademark make?
Trademark or not, “Women Owned” is a statement. It raises the question, WHAT entity is owned by women. WBENC may have authorized the use of their trademark, but Wal-Mart was the entity that chose to use it in the manner it did. It used it in a misleading manner, by failing to answer that question, thereby leaving the implication that either Wal-Mart or the Equate brand was the ‘women owned’ entity.
ETA: If you put a phrase in a trademark, its plain English meaning doesn’t get erased. It’s still there.
I can’t list every hypothetical requirement that doesn’t actually exist. The FPLA states the conditions under which the manufacturer must appear. “The label makes other claims about the manufacturer” isn’t one of them.
That it’s a brand identity gives them much more leeway, as they can argue puffery. Best Buy, say, doesn’t have to be literally the best buy in all situations. There are limits but they’re looser than purely descriptive claims.
If we’re gonna nitpick, it’s:
the phrase “WOMEN OWNED”, with “WOMEN” stacked on top of “OWNED”, where the letter “O” in “WOMEN” is displayed as a six-sided circular design consisting of interlocking pieces made up of curved lines and dots that resemble people.
You can still state that your product is “women owned” without violating anyone’s trademark as long as you don’t make it look like their logo.
Bottom line: US regulation is not perfect. I’m shocked; shocked I say. Film at 11.
Said regulations are all about to be non-existent. Get used to having no reason to believe anything about anything. It’ll be Alice in NihilstLand.
Maybe they just figure that buyers of shampoo are mostly women, and so that particular bottle will probably end up being “women owned”.
I find it interesting that the trademark listing mentions a “design search code” of 02.03.26, which is:
02.03.26 Grotesque women formed by letters, numbers, punctuation or geometric shapes
Yeah, I’m aware that “grotesque” can mean any sort of strange arrangement of human forms, but in modern use it’s almost perfectly synonymous with ugly.
About stuff I’d have needed to pull out a magnifying glass to see.
Whatever.
THE FACTUAL QUESTION HAS BEEN ANSWERED. MODS, FEEL FREE TO CLOSE THIS THREAD AT ANY TIME YOU WISH.
(Yes, I’ve already requested this.)
We normally don’t close threads just because the factual question has been addressed. We keep the thread open and, now that the question has been addressed, we allow the topic to drift a bit (which we do not allow before the topic has been addressed factually).
Gotcha, sorry to bother you then.
In that case, I’ll just show myself the exit, as it’s descended into a really stupid level of bickering.
ETA: Never mind.
I would hate to guess how much weight the “women owned” statement carries.
A former female coworker and her husband owned a business. According to the LLC(?) paperwork she owned 51% of the company. She was also part Hispanic. Other than show up when in negotiations with another company that preferred women/minority companies to do business with I don’t think she did a damn thing in running the day to day business of the company.
Any and every system in existence has a contingent of people who game it.
IMO it’s quite a logical jump from “I have personal knowledge of one sham women-owned business” to your seeming claim of “We all can safely assume any given women-owned business is a sham”.
Or did you mean something else?
The whole point of these little badges or marks on products (indicating attainment of some accredited standard such as fair trade or organic, carbon neutral, women-owned, etc) is that they are there for the purpose of engendering trust-at-a-glance. If they were accompanied by blurb explaining what they mean, this would obviate their purpose; they are generally for people who already know what they mean, who are selecting a product that meets (or claims to meet) a standard they already know and care about.