This is one of those stories that I want to do a signal boost for. I know many of my friends are knitters/crocheters or other kinds of yarnies and crafters. This is a story about what happens when a popular Big Box Store wants to bully small artisan shops.
I know that for a long time many folks have purchased yarn and needles from Knit Picks and its other sister companies that carry Quilting supplies and Art supplies. I used to occasionally purchase yarn and needles from them too, that is until I met Tom Diak and learned about his experience having his intellectual property stolen by Knit Picks. Tom and his wife run Dyakcraft, previously known as Grafton Fibers. Tom makes beautiful hand-crafted knitting needles, crochet hooks, Harmony lap looms and drop spindles. Linda blends beautiful bats of spinning fiber; if you’ve ever been to my house and seen the gorgeous bundles of brightly colored fiber – almost all of them have come from DyakCraft.
Girl from Auntie has a really good post summing up the current situation between DyakCraft and Knitpicks with some legal commentary (her forte). For many years Tom Diak hand-made colorful wood laminate needles called “Darn Pretty Needles”, he was contacted by Craft Americana (Knit picks parent company), about purchasing the rights to make the same kind of needle. When Tom refused permission they went ahead and produced them anyway, calling them Harmony Needles (if you’ll notice above the Diak’s already had a product called Harmony). Now Knit Picks didn’t hand-make their needles, they had them mass produced, and as such significantly undercut Tom’s prices. All in all this was pretty shitty and made a noticeable dent in the sales of Darn Pretty Needles, and being that Knit Picks is such a large company with such a large presence many people eventually started thinking that Tom was stealing the idea from Knit Picks!!
Now Craft Americana has gone ahead and filed for trademark and patent rights on the name Harmony and the style of needles. HELLO!!!!! WTF!!!! This would prevent the Diaks from using the name Harmony on their looms and from making the needles they invented! So now Tom and Linda have started legal action against Craft Americana attempting to protect their products.
In any case Knit picks is apparently well known to steal/knock-off yarns and knitting tools from other companies and then undercut them. And I understand that for folks on a budget their price points are pretty alluring. But for me I can’t face giving money to a company who behaves this way in the market place.
ETA: I got an email from the Diak’s with a clairification: “Petkun said he wanted to sell our needles. And then he never contacted the distributor. That was in 2007. In March, he offered us the trade agreement you can see in the USPTO files. He never offered to buy our rights in 2007 and we never refused.”
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