Will work with the founders of Daily Basket to resolve the 'trademark' issue amicably: BigBasket

(Credits: BigBasket)

Fighting back the bully tag, BigBasket on February 23 said that it filed a suit against smaller rival Daily Basket only to protect its trademarks but was willing to resolve the issue amicably with the company.

"While checking the trademark registry, we recently came across a filing for "DailyBasket" which, in the context of the online grocery business, is a combination of two of our registered trademarks "bigbasket" and "bbdaily"," T.N. Hari, HR Head of BigBasket said a social media post.

The e-grocery firm which is selling off its 68 percent stake to Indian conglomerate Tata group last week sent bootstrapped online grocery startup Daily Basket a notice for using the word basket in its brand name and logo.

"The very purpose of the trademark registry is to put trademark applications in the public domain for 60 days, so that companies with existing trademarks may raise objections, if any. The typical next step in such cases is to send the relevant company a notice, which is exactly what we did. And even startups, however small, need to operate within the boundaries of the law. That said, we've been a startup ourselves until quite recently; and the last thing we would want is to cause inconvenience to another startup," he added.

The nine year old firm is now willing to  resolve this amicably and intended to work with the founders of Daily Basket.

BigBasket was called out on social media by many for being a bully by harassing a young company with a lawsuit for an unintentional harm.

Daily Basket too launched a page stating how BigBasket was bullying a company working out of a tiny office in Coimbatore.

"We recently received a cease and desist letter from BigBasket to close down our operations and hand over our domains (ie, our business) to them because we have 'basket' in our brand and we also sell groceries online," the company said.