Trademark!

I just opened the mail, and with the bills and statements was an official looking package.

I opened it, and found a very pretty, diploma-looking certificate, even with a gold-star-seal-official-shiny stamp on the bottom, saying that Green Modern Kits is now officially TRADEMARKED!!!!

This is especially sweet to me because a few years ago another one of my businesses, Copeland Casati Media C3, was hurt by marketplace confusion by a supposed advertising / creative non-profit that used the same C3 as a logo and was ironically supposed to be helping small businesses like myself. They rented to people who directly competed against me in the marketplace (my clients started asking if I had moved), as well as was founded by an ad agency here (my business was advertising), and when I asked them to stop using a shared identity, they refused, saying it was inconvenient for them to do so because "they had already printed up their stationary and cards" even though I had been in business eight years before they existed.

Ironically, this "non-profit", owned by an ad agency that then, in the non-profit's name, got their foot in the door to pitch some mighty large local corporations. The Creative Change Center was, I guess, not creative nor ethical enough to change.

Despite that people now jokingly refer to me as "The Real C3" now, it is still ethically not right and still confuses potential clients (I had one even call down there looking for me this year!).

So, here's to Green Modern Kits bein' all official-like an all. : )

And for similar reasons, I dedicate this post to Eco Geek and Muhammed Saleem!!!!
May the bullies with more money never rule!

Now I can stride ahead even more happily with what we're doing on Green Modern Kits, and we do have some exciting things in the works for you this fall.

One more reason to make our zero energy house party even BIGGER! Woo! Details comin' soon!

: )

P.s. How ya like my monk?
He never tells my secrets.

 

The original C3 lives.

Almost ten years ago, I started a small business.
C3 was my prominent logo, and it was a very personal choice because it formed my intitials: CCC. My business, Copeland Casati Media C3, was technology and advertising.

Despite starting a company from scratch with no industry name, no salary, and no employees, I persevered, and succeeded. So imagine my horror when, after eight successful, hard driven years, I opened the paper, a newborn at my breast, and read,
"C3 Creative Change Center, a creative advertising and web center in downtown Richmond!"

Um... I'm in advertising and web. For years.

So I called them.
"I am so sorry, don't worry, I'm not mean, but I'm sorry but I have been using C3 as my logo for years and you rent space to people who compete against me!"

Their response was, "Well we already printed letterhead, so despite the fact that we're supposed to be championing small creative businesses, um, sorry, it's not convenient to rethink our month-old identity."
Oh yes it was.

I then had to spend the money I would have spent for our first family vacation *ever* on a lawyer to protect who I was and had been for eight-ish (nine? ten?) years. Because after my phonecall, instead of doing the right thing, acknowledging that there was already a C3 in Richmond... they... tried to trademark the name!

Instead of them doing the right thing.
And with a minister or someone ministry-related at the helm, a Michele Stuchell who was supposed to be this good person championing creatives like... um, myself, a creative who started a creative business using C3, in 1999. Oh, Yes.

I would go in to pitch new clients and they'd say, "Hey, isn't your office at (where the Creative Change Center was) XYZ?" or "Did you just have that party?" Current clients asked me if I moved. And people called there looking for me, here.

So, in honor of the REAL, ORIGINAL, HOMEGROWN C3, ; ) I would like to publish the no longer working but supposedly C3 Creative Change Center domain: which shows nothing.

C3 Creative Change Center. Couldn't you have been creative and... changed?
www.c3va.org