Help Save Shoeperwoman

As many of you know, Shoeperwoman is the shoe blog belonging to Amber McNaught, a friend of mine and an excellent blogger. About a week or so ago, someone set up a site called Shoeper-Woman and is trading off the name, already well established by Amber. She refers to her husband/partner as ‘Shoeper-Man’, a phrase you will recognise as one Amber uses regularly. There is just no originality behind the blog. A post from earlier ‘clarifying’ the differences between the two sites has been removed – presumably because there was a growing number of ‘why have you stolen Amber’s name’ comments appearing there.

You can read all about the dispute here, but the bottom line is, Amber has not trademarked the name due to the expense (hello, have you seen how much it costs to trademark in the UK?! And yes, she’s looking into it now) but this site is part of how she makes her living. Along with the Fashion Police and a couple of other sites, Amber and her husband run Midas Media, their own business. The imposter ‘Shoeper-Woman’ has applied for a trademark on the name and if she is granted it, Amber will have to close her site down. Which will mean she will lose a portion of her income.

‘Shoeper-Woman’ has been in touch with Amber again, asking her to stop the ‘hate campaign’ she is running on her blog and threatening to go to the police over the matter. Amber has posted only the facts of what has happened and has done nothing wrong. ‘Shoeper-Woman’ claims not to have seen the original Shoeperwoman site, yet I quote her email published by Amber this evening:

“Seeing any form of Shoeper-Woman wasn’t already registered I didn’t think that ShoeperWoman was a serious company, I thought it was an American site, and just a bit of fun, and not a competitor as you don’t retail shoes or design them.”

I didn’t think that ShoeperWoman was a serious company.

So she did see it before she set up her site then?

What can you do to help?

Google Shoeper-Woman (with the hyphen – I’m not linking to her as I don’t want to send any traffic her way from my blog) and leave her a comment telling her you support Amber and ask her to consider changing the name of her site (though any posts that get a lot of comment will probably also be removed...)

If you have a blog, Facebook account, Twitter, anything where you can post to the web, post something with the word Shoeperwoman hyperlinking to www.shoeperwoman.com. This will help to cement Amber’s position in search engines and support her right to the trademark when she disputes the claim.

Visit Shoeperwoman, tweet @foreveramber or leave a comment on the Shoeperwoman facebook page to let Amber know she has your support. I can’t imagine what she is going through right now – knowing her business that she has worked so hard to build up over the past few years could be under threat.

You may remember something similar happened with The Coveted blog recently – people power forced the new blog to change their name: we can do the same again now.