Designmoto

Hi offersnet,

We apologize for any confusion any other company using our product names might be causing for you and others.

We are the original and official Startup WordPress Theme. However, others continue to also use this name despite the confusion it causes and sadly we can only do so much to protect you and our brand.

We are not affiliated with any other company or product using our name nor do we endorse their use.

We don’t believe you’re one of our customers, but if you send us an email with the order # or purchase email used we can check to see if you’ve placed an order with us:

https://startupwp.com/contact/

In any case, for the trouble, we’d be happy to provide you with a free copy of StartupPro.

Hope this clarifies the situation some. We understand and sympathize with the confusion this causes.

Thank you.

Hi offersnet,

Your refund has been issued.

Again, we’re deeply sorry and concerned that other companies continue to name their products the same as ours, causing these very kinds of issues.

It’s especially concerning considering that we warned these companies of these kinds of confusions that could develop immediately upon realizing these companies were using our product names prior to any issues arising.

In fact, these companies were warned well in advance much further back than 6 months, only unfortunately, some companies refuse to fix the problem regardless of the confusion it causes because of interest in the marketing value of the word “Startup”.

Considering we are the official and original Startup® (the first to use the name in this market) and have built our entire company around helping startups (the word Startup appears in the very name of our company even) you can imagine our frustration in trying to protect our brand and customers as well as other customers in the marketplace even of those companies that seem to not care about their own customers very much.

Here are a few tips to try and salvage your website:

1. Many hosts make courtesy backups automatically. You might be able to contact your host and have them restore your site to an earlier date.

2. You can check Google’s cache to retrieve important content like custom CSS that you might have added.

Hopefully this issue was limited to a small number of customers and didn’t break many more websites.

Let us know if there’s anything further we can do to help.

Thank you and good luck getting your site back up and running.

Yes, we’ve taken appropriate action against any company who’s created this problem for our brand and consumers in the marketplace. We cannot discuss specific companies or specific details, but know that we’ve done our due diligence.

We’ve reported trademark infringement where possible and done the best we can to protect our mark from abuses like this:

http://www.trademarkia.com/startup-86058407.html

Yes, we’re also aware that our products are vastly different from those that have copied our product name, but are still close enough to cause confusion. It’s like a tennis shoe and high heel being branded with the same name. They’re both clearly different at first glance, but on paper are still both footwear which is very specific and will cause confusion. As such, since the products are unique, if you put your product out after a similar product which has already taken a name you like it would be wise to find another name. Choosing to neglect this is where problems begin to arise.

On the internet, the problems are more concerned with infringers stealing traffic away from the official product on Google and for technical issues like this, etc. We’ve never taken issue with any other products that are copying our product name, in fact some of them are quite nice, we’ve only ever asked that they please name their products something unique that’s not already taken.

The reason this specific issue is possible is because of the conflict with the WordPress update API. This is the very reason there are WordPress quality guidelines and requirements: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review#Guidelines.

Specifically, we’re looking at this rule:

Themes must provide a unique slug for anything in the public namespace, including translation textdomain, all custom function names, classes, hooks, public/global variables, database entries (Theme options, post custom metadata, etc.)

Naturally, since we were the first Startup WordPress theme, we’ve used the slug startup. It’s important to understand that the purpose of having a unique slug is to avoid this very kind of conflict. We respect the community, consumers and the marketplace. Now, if a company were to come along and neglect others trademarks and name their product the same as another, they would most likely neglect to create a unique slug as well.

What we have here is clearly a conflict of theme names/slugs which has confused the WordPress update API.

Again, please note that we do our best to respect others in the community and marketplace and know that we’ve done all we can on our end. It’s now the responsibility of other companies to take ownership of their mistakes and correct them. And of course, you, the consumer, are the most important reason why trademark laws and guidelines like these exist and it’s your right to make a complaint if you ever think a business it displaying unfair business practices.

You may also want to make a request to any company practicing business this way where you use their products or services to do the best they can to protect yourself and their other customers from these pitfalls in the future.

Thank you again for raising these concerns and allowing us to clarify what is happening.