femininewear's facebook page, Heli from Lunette left this statement to clarify Lunette's reasoning on this issue:Hello all!
First I thought that I won't say anything but it seems that it's not possible :) So I'll try to open this discuss a bit more from our end and I'll hope you'll then understand a bit more where we are standing and why we are doing the things we are doing now.
It all goes to the year 2004 when I started to design a new menstrual cup that would fit me better than the ones in the markets (Divacup, Mooncup, Keeper). So after a months of designing and talking to different experts I came up with the design of Lunette. If you have seen other cups you know that Lunette is totally different than the cups then (Divacup, Mooncup, Keeper) and the main differences are the stem and the rim. Then I made couple of cups as a samples, send them to my friends and friends of friends for trying and they all loved it! So Lunette went to production.
Since I spend months of designing the cup and it was totally different than other cups back then we decided (as a company) to get all the possible intellectual property rights in place. We didn’t wanted our hard work to go wasted and we truly believed (even back then) that menstrual cups can be mainstream products in the future.
Lunette was the first menstrual cup sold in South Africa and around year after we started to sell there, Mpowercup was launched. We knew that it was our cup that was the base for it and we have seen the designer even saying in the forums that “I actually copied the Lunette exactly so the size difference should be marginal”. We didn’t mind about that too much since South Africa wasn’t never a big market for us but now their cups were sold in the EU which is still our main market. Therefore we asked Teresa to stop selling them (as a importer her company is responsible for the product in the EU) because we (and our lawyers) believe that Mpowercup is violating our intellectual property rights such as our model protection. If you’ll look at pictures of these two cups you can’t really which one is Lunette and which is Mpowercup but if you compare for example Mooncup and Lunette you can say that. Even Miacup with a flat stem is different since the rim is totally different. The color or the transparency of the cup doesn’t matter, it’s the design that does.
We value greatly Teresa’s work with different kinds of reusable sanpro products but we want the competition to be fair and not based on copying. We think that every sold menstrual cup (even if they are not our cups) are good for the whole business. And we don’t mind about the competition since we know that our cup is the best :) Our real competitors are disposable pads and tampons!
Hope this clarifies our point of view!
Heli/Lunette
I'll refrain from adding any personal opinion to this post. I just thought y'all might be interested to read it.