Baby Wit received a cease and desist order from the Gerber Corporation for the use of the word “onesie” on our website. We’ve gotten to a point in our business careers where receipt of a cease and desist order isn’t instant cause for a freak out. These things fly around like hotcakes, American businesses having a seemingly endless team of lawyers sitting around with nothing to do but worry about who unknowingly slipped a trademarked term onto a web page.

(If big business stock weren’t so overinflated, we wouldn’t have time for this argument, because they’d be properly competing for a buck like the rest of us, and wouldn’t have the money to hire a bunch of overpriced lawyers.)

The onesie, however, is an interesting case. Google indexes over 157,000 web pages that use the word onesie, the majority of which are commercial sites selling onesies not related to Gerber. I am sure that many of these companies, as they creep up the search rankings, are well on their way to receiving the same cease and desist letter we have. And they will, if they are small businesses like ours, pull the word onesie off their websites.

But there is a problem here. There is no good searchable equivalent of the word onesie. A quick look at keyword statistics reveals that when people are shopping for onesies, they type in the keyword onesies. None of the other synonyms match up–creepers, bodysuits, one pieces, snapsuits–none of them get nearly the traffic that the word “onesie” does.

Furthermore, these terms have their own inherent problems. One pieces, more often than not, relate to women’s swimsuits, and so if you use this term on your site you have people visiting looking for swimsuits instead of baby onesies. (For a while, we were getting a ton of traffic on the search term “one piece sex.” A quick glance at the stats revealed that these people were not, in fact, hunting for Baby Wit.) Creepers is largely a U.K. term. Bodysuits conjures surfing. You get the picture.

So the question becomes this: Should Gerber be allowed to control the Internet real estate on a powerful search term because they hold the trademark to that term? Gerber is essentially setting up a monopoly on a search term. They’re saying that no one else is allowed to set up shop on Main St. (Onesie St.), forcing everyone else to sell in the ghetto (Get your One Piece Sex here!)

We get a lot of traffic on search terms like “funny onesies.” These people are not looking for Gerber onesies–they’re looking for us. Does Gerber have a right to take this business away from us? Can a company “own” a Google search term?

It’ll be interesting to see if Google and Gerber eventually butt heads on this. Google’s been selling their “Google onesie” in the Google store for a while now, even though it’s printed on a American Apparel one piece. Wonder if they’ll comply with the cease and desist…

So last month we were audited by the Oregon Employment Department. We were, of course, terrified–mostly we were racking our brain for anything we might have done wrong. They assured us that it was a routine audit–that our number just came up–yet we were suspicious. How could we not be suspicious? Surely in our ineptitude we had done something egregiously wrong!

So they did our audit, and lo and behold, after they had finished crunching a bunch of numbers, they wrote us a check! We had paid them TOO MUCH MONEY. And furthermore, after cutting us a check, they made us feel all warm & fuzzy by telling us that we were one of the cleanest companies they had ever audited. Hooray for us!

Apparently, the payroll service we were using had Andrea and I paying unemployment insurance, even though we’re self-employed and weren’t legally obligated to pay it. This had been going on for three years, so we got three years worth of UI money back, a good chunk of change.

Now, the devil that hangs out over my right shoulder is saying, hey, clean equals stupid–what are all these dirty tricks that other businesses know about that we don’t? Why are we sending all this money to Halliburton when it could be going back into our own pockets? But I’m trying to squish the devil and not look a gift horse in the mouth.