Hello cake family!
An issue has come to our attention that we want to take some time to address.
We LOVE all of the amazing cake ideas you give us on a daily basis. We are constantly being challenged and pushed to our decorative limits and love every second of it. But we need to talk about something we CAN’T do.
Many times, we get requests for specific “character” themed cakes, for example, Mickey Mouse, other Disney characters, Thomas the Tank Engine, Spongebob Square Pants, Hello Kitty, and the list goes on and on. Here lies the issue: these “characters” are trademarked by their companies. If a local shop duplicates their trademarked character, AND MAKES MONEY ON IT, the local shop is infringing on the main company’s trademark, and that is illegal. I’ve heard of cake shops that have been sued for between $30,000 and $150,000 for trademark infringement. And that, my friends is a scary thought.
You may have seen character cake pans and things of this nature for sale in baking stores. Those are for PERSONAL use only and not for the purpose of making money.
That being said, we at Let Them Eat Cake! do not want to do anything that is infringing on another company’s trademark rights to their characters. We strive to be a respectable business and we always want to stay within the legal parameters of what we do.
So, what CAN we do and still be within the boundaries of the law???
Let’s say, for example, you want a Spongebob themed cake. We can go one of three routes:
1. We can purchase a license from Nickelodeon that would allow us to recreate their trademarked characters (which is expensive);
2. We can get EXPRESS WRITTEN permission from the company (ie. Contract) to produce the cake (this process must be started no later than 3 months prior to the event); or
3. You can purchase Nickelodeon-produced figurines and put them on a basic sea-themed cake that we create. I have posted a picture as an example. However, we CANNOT make the Nickelodeon characters in our shop.
So, all that being said, we CAN make your party cake, but we can not make the characters themselves out of cake materials, nor can we paint them onto a cake. We hope you understand where we are coming from. We are educating ourselves on this matter and want our customers to be educated on this as well. Have we done it in the past? Sure have. When I was making cakes out of my house for friends, I didn’t know any better and made a few character cakes, some of which you may have seen in the past. But once I discovered that it was illegal, I stopped. That is why those pictures have been removed from Facebook and my photo albums.
Here are a few other cakes that we have done within the legal boundaries:
Now that we all know this, let’s get creative and make an AWESOME cake!!!
