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comment by fletcher
fletcher  ·  1281 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Massina Lab has brought back the Big Eye Compax

"Inspired by" seems... a bit cheeky.





kleinbl00  ·  1281 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah so Universal Geneve is kind of... an undead company? They haven't done anything new since 2004. Their website was down from 2010 until... like 18 months ago, at which point they had a "coming soon." They're back up as of about six months ago, but they're selling the same stuff they had in 2004.

The way this stuff works is you kind of have a "use it or lose it" situation with the Swiss. If your brand lies fallow, they will literally sell it out from under you: Jean-Claude Biver bought the rights to Blancpain for 22,000CHF in like '84 or something and now they're one of the titans of the high-end. It's funny every single Swiss company claims heritage back to fifteen diggity two but their average restart date is like 1984.

Massena bought the copyright to the term "Uni-Compax" 18 months ago. Yer damn skippy they tried to buy the rights. I'll bet Universal stood up their website just so they could claim they aren't defunct.

So now the question becomes whether or not the Japanese holding company sues. The issue at hand is how much of Universal Geneve they actually own. If they don't, guaranteed a Ferrovie Dello Stato and Polerouter will follow.