In response to DailyBasket’s bully jibe at them, BigBasket today said that it filed a suit against their smaller rival only to protect its trademarks, but intends to resolve the issue amicably with the firm.
“While checking the trademark registry, we recently came across a filing for “DailyBasket” which, in the context of the online grocery business, is a combination of two of our registered trademarks “BigBasket” and “bbdaily,” BigBasket HR Head T N Hari said in a message posted on his LinkedIn account.
“We intend to work with the founder of DailyBasket to resolve this amicably while at the same time protecting our brand and trademarks. We will work in a fair manner with DailyBasket and expect the same of DailyBasket,” he added.
A few days back, BigBasket had sent DailyBasket a notice for using the word basket in its brand name and logo.
Justifying the company’s decision to send the notice to DailyBasket, Hari said: “The very purpose of the trademark registry is to put trademark applications in the public domain for 60 days, so that companies with existing trademarks may raise objections if any. The typical next step in such cases is to send the relevant company a notice, which is exactly what we did.”
“And even startups, however small, need to operate within the boundaries of the law. That said, we’ve been a startup ourselves until quite recently, and the last thing we would want is to cause inconvenience to another startup,” he added.
BigBasket was trolled on social media for bullying a small company with a lawsuit. In retaliation, DailyBasket too opened a website calling BigBasket a bully.
“We recently received a cease and desist letter from BigBasket to close down our operations and hand over our domains (ie, our business) to them because we have ‘basket’ in our brand and we also sell groceries online,” the company said.
