Costco isn’t the first brand name to pop-up when consumers are looking for high-end luxury, but a few folks thought they had found it there when they came across low-cost Tiffany diamond engagement rings. (And they didn’t even have to buy them in bulk.)
Unfortunately for all those customers, the rings weren’t quite the real thing. Now, Tiffany has taken Costco to court for marketing some high-end jewelry in the past few years under its brand, without permission.
“We now know that there are hundreds if not thousands of Costco members who think they bought a Tiffany engagement ring at Costco, which they didn’t,” Jeffrey Mitchell, a lawyer for Tiffany, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “Costco knew what it was doing when it used the Tiffany trademark to sell rings that had nothing to do with Tiffany.” The company was tipped off by a California customer back in November of the alleged scam.
This isn’t the first time Tiffany has had trouble with a low-cost seller. It battled with Overstock.com back in 2010, which had sold 1,365 pendants under the Tiffany name. It also had legal battles with eBay, claiming that the online seller was at fault for allowing some of its vendors to sell counterfeit Tiffany items, but the court never agreed with Tiffany on that one.
Tiffany seems to have a better case against Costco, which legally sells high-end jewelry brands such as Cartier, Breitling, and Chanel — not to mention other luxury brands such as Coach, Burberry and Mercedes-Benz — at select locations, such as Boca Raton, of course.
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