Vancouver underwear maker SAXX appears to have won a patent dispute with Stateside Merchants over that company's Pair of Thieves and Hustle underwear designs.
SAXX had filed a lawsuit in Canada alleging that California's Stateside Merchants had breached the patents. SAXX told BIV in an email that it has settled the lawsuit and that Stateside Merchants will donate $2,500 on behalf of SAXX to the Testicular Cancer Foundation, which is based in Texas.
"We take ball care seriously and believe it’s important to support charitable organizations that do the same," SAXX said in its statement. "
We get why other underwear brands want to emulate our designs, but that doesn't change the fact that our designs are patented."
The company said that it is "obsessed with delivering comfort for men" and that its patented technology helps to achieve that goal.
SAXX CEO Wendy Bennison was not immediately available for an interview.
It is not clear how well sales are going at the privately held company, but pre-pandemic there was significant sales growth.
Bennison told BIV in 2018 that SAXX's sales were in the tens of millions of dollars and that this was up about 14-fold since 2013.
She joined the company as its CEO in June 2017, following a career that saw her be chief operating officer at Mark’s, president at Roots and president at Kit and Ace.
Her plan for SAXX was to expand the company’s wholesale network into the U.S., which in 2018 already accounted for about half of the company’s sales, she told BIV at the time.
Her marketing strategy was to study e-commerce data to determine where the company’s underwear was shipped and target marketing in those areas. She also aimed to get psychographic analyses of target shoppers and of various neighbourhoods within desirable U.S. metropolitan areas in order to target marketing in those areas.
SAXX's business tends to be through e-commerce and wholesale partners.
The company earlier this year partnered with the Hudson's Bay Co. to open a 400-square-foot store within Hudson's Bay Co.'s flagship Toronto location.
"This space will allow us to showcase the support of our proprietary BallPark Pouch, the cooling benefits of our DropTemp Cooling technology [and newer collections,]" Bennison said in a statement to BIV at the time.
