reflection reflecting

Being a manufacturer in 2007 involves constantly looking over your shoulder as it seems everyone wants to tap into your market. Sadly this doesn't mean that the competition has developed a new innovation and raised the bar in the product category. No that would be what we call the good ole days of competition. In today's world manufacturers respond to the success of someone else's product by copying the product design as closely as possible. Legal or illegal, moral or not it happens to everyone that tries to design and sell quality, original products. We deal with knockoffs of our products all the time, but rather than dwelling on the followers we just keep doing our best at designing fun products for the open fire.

Funny enough it doesn't stop with products. I just found out the other day that a website dedicated to recipes had taken a bunch of our pie iron recipes and posted them on their site as their own. They even grabbed an introductory paragraph from our catalog. It was thanks to Rome pie iron fan, Shannon from Cincinnati who clued me in -

"...while looking online for some recipes (cause I’m having a hard time finding YOUR Pie Iron Recipe cookbook…) I came across this website, http://recipesource.tripod.com/rvrecipes/id10.html and while looking over the site something looked VERY familiar to me. As I mentioned, I’ve looked thoroughly over your website and I really liked the first paragraph of this page, http://www.pieiron.com/designs.htm#cookbook (the campfire snack/memory paragraph). When I was looking on the above recipe site I realized that they have the same paragraph on their site. I didn’t know if that passage was written by someone at your company and thought I would bring it to your attention…just in case."

Now of course I don't think this is a huge deal, but it's more of an issue of principal. If you're going to print my writing verbatim then just have the courtesy of crediting and linking. Actually I'm only bringing this up on the blog as my emails to the webmaster have all bounced back as undeliverable. Just having one of those "gotta get it off my chest" moments.