Baton Rouge tech startup Tigeraire is wrapped up in a legal dispute over trademark infringement with TaylorMade Golf subsidiary Sun Day Red by Tiger Woods.
Founded in 2020, Tigeraire is best known for its Air Accelerator technology that creates airflow for personal cooling devices in athletic and industrial settings. Using that technology, the company developed a helmet for LSU’s football program—the Tigeraire Cyclone—to enhance player comfortability and performance. The company was the first in Louisiana to attract a seed round investment from a Global Top 50 Venture Capital firm.
Sun Day Red, meanwhile, is an apparel brand that was launched by golf superstar Tiger Woods in April of this year. The company, a subsidiary of Taylor Made Golf Company Inc., is backed by South Korean private equity firm Centroid Investment Partners.
Tigeraire alleges that Sun Day Red launched with a logo “nearly identical” to its own already established mark—a striped, leaping tiger—thereby causing market confusion.
Seeking to block Sun Day Red’s trademark application, Tigeraire filed a notice of opposition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in September. Sun Day Red has now filed a federal lawsuit against Tigeraire in California—a jurisdiction that Greg Latham, Tigeraire’s intellectual property attorney, says is inappropriate.
In its complaint filed in federal court in the Central District of California, Sunday Red LLC alleges that after months of silence in negotiations, Tigeraire sent “an outrageous monetary demand to Sun Day Red, hoping to force Sun Day Red to provide (it) with an enormous and undeserved windfall.” Its filing notes that its own logo has 15 stripes, each one symbolizing one of Tiger Woods’s 15 major championship victories.
“Sun Day Red’s lawyers are attempting to drag Tigeraire into Sun Day Red’s backyard in California with an inappropriate anticipatory filing,” a statement from Latham reads. “We believe strongly that the only logical jurisdiction for court proceedings would be in Louisiana, where Tigeraire was founded.”
Tigeraire CEO Jack Karavich claims that the logos’ similarities have already begun to dilute his company’s market presence.
“This year, our company has had marketing teams at major professional golf events, and at each one, we have experienced customer confusion between our brand identity and Sun Day Red’s,” a statement from Karavich reads. “We’ve had innumerable caddies of professional golfers, as well as high-profile personalities from ESPN, the Golf Channel, the PGA Tour, Greyson Clothiers and many more mistakenly think our logo is that of Sun Day Red.”
