Ooni created the small backyard pizza oven segment, and have been instrumental in growing it to what it is today. As they’ve grown the segment, it’s brought quite a few imitators.
From a Scottish court ruling there will now be one less copycat on the market. Ooni successfully won two judgements against Foshan Hanshi and their Flamo brand pizza oven.
The court ruled that Foshan infringed on Ooni’s intellectual property (IP), and that they would have to £100,000 in damages and Ooni’s legal fees. They also have to deliver the ovens with infringing designs to be destroyed.
Ooni won another IP case against Foshan that determined Foshan’s designs were too close to Ooni’s and therefore invalid. The offending ovens were very close to the Koda 12 and Koda 16 gas powered pizza ovens.
Importance of IP
Having healthy competition between pizza oven brands is ultimately good for the overall segment. There’s a difference though when designs are knock-offs. Ooni invested lots of time and money innovating the pizza oven to deliver a product that we can say first hand works very well.
The danger of copycat products is it allows cheap competitors to shortcut their way to market and eat away at market share. They have no R&D or marketing invested, so they can also undercut pricing.
There’s also the hazard that cheap imitations will have inferior performance and quality, which can negatively impact the category, and ultimately Ooni. Consumers may not know the difference between an Ooni pizza oven and a knock-off, which also can hurt the brand.
It’s important that Ooni keeps fighting to defend their IP because there are quite a few Ooni Koda copycats. A quick Google search shows many imitators, even with private labeled products from known brands.