Blooming Elegant, a mainstay of wedding invitations and glittery flasks, is at the center of the alleged fraud.
(Bloomberg) — The font Blooming Elegant is admired for its loping, cursive lettering, described by its creator as “playful” and “super flirty.” A download for personal use costs $17. On Wednesday, the font’s designer, Nicky Laatz, accused the online retailer Zazzle Inc. in US federal court of stealing the design and using it to fraudulently generate hundreds of millions of dollars for itself.
Zazzle, which sells custom-printed day planners, coffee mugs and other goods online, offered Blooming Elegant until recently among the hundreds of fonts available for customers to decorate their trinkets. In her complaint filed in a Northern California district court, Laatz claims Zazzle representatives asked the British font designer in 2016 to license her product. She didn’t respond and says a Zazzle employee, a senior network engineer, then bought a license meant for individual use and helped carry out the alleged fraud. Zazzle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Redwood City, California-based company was founded in 2005 and has been inching toward an initial public offering as soon as this year. Zazzle hired Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Plc for an IPO and could seek a market value of $1 billion to $2 billion, Bloomberg reported in February. (More recently, uncertainty in the public markets has led many companies to delay their listings.)
After the font was made available on Zazzle, it became one of the most popular on the site, according to the complaint. Its distinguished letters adorn wedding invitations, business cards, glittery flasks and smartphone cases. Laatz complained about the single-user license in 2020, but, she alleges, Zazzle kept using Blooming Elegant for two years after that.
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