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The Queens' Tea company will keep its name after settling a federal trademark lawsuit with a Seattle tea company.
"Under the settlement, we can still use The Queens' Tea name in Utah," co-owner Seth Anderson said Wednesday. "It's good news, and we're so glad it's over."
Under the agreement, the Salt Lake City company must use a different name if it wants to again sell products online, Anderson said.
Last year, Seattle's Queen Mary tea company sued Anderson and partner Michael Ferguson for "willful trademark infringement," alleging the company name was too similar to its Queen Mary Tea Room, which is well- known among tea enthusiasts. Queen Mary Tea also has an online wholesale tea business.
On Feb. 1, Anderson and Ferguson were forced to stop The Queens' Tea online business and close their commercial kitchen to cover legal fees.
"While we lost our kitchen," Anderson said, "we will continue to work with our wholesale accounts in town, and we are still selling at the (farmers) markets."
Anderson and Ferguson started their company in 2012 as a side job while they worked on graduate degrees at the University of Utah. As the first same-sex couple to legally marry in Utah — soon after a federal court struck down the state's gay marriage ban in December 2013 — they say the word "queens" in their business name refers to the slang term for a gay man and has nothing to do with British royalty.
In January, when The Queens' Tea supporters learned about the lawsuit, they flooded the Seattle company's web and social media sites with negative comments.
Now that an agreement has been reached, both sides "are eager to move on and get back to the business of tea," according to an official statement released by both companies on Facebook. "The companies ask their friends and supporters to refrain from making disparaging or threatening comments or claims directed at either company."
Anderson and Ferguson plan to "rethink" their operation and eventually hope to open an online store. The tea products likely will be sold under the name DigniTEA, the company's nonprofit arm, Anderson said. In the past, The Queens' Tea has made donations to Salt Lake City's Homeless Youth Resource Center, which provides services for many gay teens.
"We've been in the process of developing our nonprofit DigniTEA, but we've had to put it on pause way too long," Anderson said. "We've put so much of our resources and time and mental bandwidth into lawsuits instead of putting it toward social issues we are concerned about."
This the second lawsuit Ferguson has been involved in. He is one of four gay men to file suit against those who perform "conversion therapy," the controversial treatment that purports to change a person's sexual orientation from gay to straight. The men are suing under New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act, which protects people from deceptive, false or fraudulent business practices. That trial will begin in June.