A cloth­ing re­tail­er from Pe­nal has agreed to have its ship­ment of over 8,000 im­i­ta­tion slip­pers de­stroyed.

DB Fun­styles Cloth­ing Lim­it­ed came to the agree­ment yes­ter­day as it con­ced­ed a trade­mark in­fringe­ment law­suit brought by in­ter­na­tion­al sports­wear man­u­fac­tur­ers Nike In­no­vate CV and Puma SE.

DB Fun­styles gave the con­ces­sion as the case was set to go on tri­al be­fore Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad, yes­ter­day morn­ing.

Its lawyer, Ra­jiv Sochan, was ini­tial­ly seek­ing the ad­journ­ment of the tri­al due to the un­avail­abil­i­ty of a key wit­ness, but made a con­ces­sion af­ter the ap­pli­ca­tion was re­fused and he had brief dis­cus­sions with the com­pa­nies’ lawyers, led by Miguel Vasquez.

While Sochan agreed that his client would cov­er the costs of de­stroy­ing the coun­ter­feit footwear through shred­ding, he claimed that his client was not sat­is­fied with the quo­ta­tion pro­vid­ed by the T&T Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL).

Jus­tice Seep­er­sad ad­vised the par­ties to have fur­ther dis­cus­sions on find­ing a cheap­er al­ter­na­tive that is en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly and would pre­vent the items from find­ing their way in­to the lo­cal re­tail mar­ket.

As part of the case, Unit­ed States-based Nike and Ger­many-based Puma, which are the largest and third largest sports­wear man­u­fac­tur­ers in the world, re­spec­tive­ly, were seek­ing an in­junc­tion bar­ring DB Fun­styles from fur­ther breach­ing their trade­marks.

How­ev­er, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad re­fused, as he not­ed that both com­pa­nies were al­ready pro­tect­ed by the pro­vi­sions of the Trade Marks Act that it in­voked when it pur­sued the case.

Jus­tice Seep­er­sad not­ed the case was im­por­tant be­cause its out­come led to the de­struc­tion of the mer­chan­dise, which was pur­chased us­ing sig­nif­i­cant for­eign ex­change.

He sug­gest­ed that DB Fun­styles should have been wary about the au­then­tic­i­ty of the slip­pers when it was pur­chas­ing the en­tire ship­ment for ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$50,000.

DB Fun­styles was al­so or­dered to pay the com­pa­nies’ le­gal costs for pur­su­ing the law­suit.

The case was ini­ti­at­ed af­ter DB Fun­styles suc­cess­ful­ly im­port­ed the ship­ment in Jan­u­ary 2023.

The com­pa­nies ap­plied to have the ship­ment seized pend­ing the out­come of their case af­ter they were alert­ed by Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion of­fi­cials that the mer­chan­dise, which con­sist­ed of 7,012 Nike, 288 Air Jor­dan, and 660 Puma slip­pers, was coun­ter­feit.

DB Fun­styles con­ced­ed the as­pect of the case brought by Puma while the law­suit was at a pre­lim­i­nary stage.

It con­tin­ued the lit­i­ga­tion with Nike as it called on the sports­wear gi­ant to prove that the items bear­ing its trade­mark were coun­ter­feit.

“The De­fen­dant avers that there are gen­uine Nike and Air Jor­dan man­u­fac­tur­ers in Chi­na, and it has no rea­son to doubt that the seized goods are not gen­uine ar­ti­cles,” it said.

The com­pa­nies were al­so rep­re­sent­ed by Fan­ta Punch. DB Fun­styles was al­so rep­re­sent­ed by Kiel Tak­lals­ingh and Ste­fan Ramkissoon.