Tiger Woods’ Sun Day Red logo involved in trademark challenge

In May, when Tiger Woods launched his new golf apparel line Sun Day Red in partnership with TaylorMade Golf, he told a story explaining the background of the company’s logo. The design includes a leaping tiger with 15 stripes, which Woods said represented the number of major championships he won during his career.

"My goal is to ruin the logo," Woods said when appearing with Carson Daly on the "Today Show,” joking about how he hoped to win more majors in the future. “I want to keep ruining the logo. If the trademark is this, then my job is to ruin it."

That logo, still with its 15 stripes, is now at the center of a trademark dispute.

On Wednesday, officials with Tigeraire, a Baton Rouge, La., company that manufacturers cooling products, filed a motion of opposition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requesting Sun Day Red’s trademark application be denied. As first reported by CNBC, Tigeraire officials contend the Sun Day Red logo “unlawfully hijacked” the design of its branding. Tigeraire’s logo also contains a leaping tiger.

“The actions of SDR, TaylorMade and Tiger Woods blatantly ignore Tigeraire’s long-standing protected mark, brand and identity, violate federal and state intellectual property law, and disregard the consumer confusion their actions create,” stated Tigeraire in the court filing.

On Thursday, Sunday Red LLC responded by filing a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Tigeraire, seeking, among other things, a declaration that Sun Day Red has not infringed on Tigeraire’s trademark rights and that there is no likelihood of consumer confusion between the two.

In the 24-page brief, Sun Day Red lawyers allege that Tigeraire has challenged the trademark in hopes of extracting “an unwarranted financial windfall from a larger and more successful brand based on threats of legal action and demands for exorbitant sums.”

According to Tigeraire's website, the company was founded in 2020 with an original objective of creating "a cooler and more comfortable environment inside the helmets of the newly minted NCAA Championship football team, the LSU Tigers." Its products incorporate small fans to offer cooling conditions inside helmets. Its consumer base eventually expanded to include industrial workers and recreational golfers, with a clip-on fan product added to its offerings.

Neither filing appears to prohibit Sun Day Red from producing or selling products with its logo as the process with the USPTO and the District Court play out.

Woods unveiled the creation of Sun Day Red in February after announcing in January that his 27-year association with Nike had come to an end. Sun Day Red began offering products in May.