Watch Out For Your Brand

We are not even a tiny bit surprised that luxurious watch designer Cartier doesn’t appreciate a joke, particularly a vulgar parody of its logo. According to the Daily Beast, a Parsons grad student created some spoof hats after a sales attendant in a Cartier store was rude to his friend. Originally created as a gag, the master’s candidate produced two beanie hats embroidered with a rude manipulation of the brand’s scripty logo. The hats were initially intended as a one off, but bombarded with requests of where they could be bought; the quirky, controversial designer produced additional items. ‘KTHANKSBYE’ soon evolved into a miniature brand, with two product offerings and a tiny production run of 26 pieces in total, valued at $50 per fashion item.   Of course this did not sit well at Cartier HQ, who responded to the grad with a letter, demanding him to stop! The baffled student has reportedly accepted the defeat, unlike the previous rebel brands, The South Butt and Chewy Vuitton.

These stunts are relatively entertaining and most of the time require a considerable amount of time and effort to be invested into them; but, could some of these angry jokers be going too far? More and more we have seen extremely realistic protest parodies, with Shell’s “let’s go viral” being one of the extremely controversial ones recently. 

In this case there seems to have been no problems, apart from damaging the ego of Cartier. However, from a branding point of view, these actions could have been detrimental to the well established, opulent brand. Remember to think twice before buying those knock offs from the market!