Sportswear giant Nautica continues to harass local St. Croix sailor and entrepreneur Jeannie Sylvester regarding her line of Nauti-gal apparel. Sylvester has received several threatening “cease and desist” letters from Nautica’s legal department.

Jean decided to design her own line of sailing garb for gals after suffering years wearing what the “big boys” thought she should wear. Tired of the same ole same ole, she set out to design sailing apparel for women that would fit, function and “appeal to her feminine sense of style”.

Despite no similarities in products, designs, or logos, Nautica thinks her brand name Nauti-Gal is too similar to theirs, claiming a right to the prefix “nauti”. Even Microsoft, famous for throwing its weight around, hasn’t been so bold as to claim trademark rights to “Micro” and bully Microcom,Microdyne, Microlab, Microprose, Microtech, Microtek, et al.

We think that if Nautica put as much effort into designing comfortable competition-quality sailing apparel for women as it does in trying to intimidate possible competitors, Nauti-Gal would never have come about and Jeannie could have spent more time sailing and less designing clothes.

If you agree, you can tell Nautica to leave her alone by:

Calling: (212) 541-5757;    Faxing: (212) 887-8136

or writing: Nautica, 40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019

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Nautica -

Tags: St. Croix

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Island Buzz, Rants, St. Croix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.