New rubber clogs rub Crocs the wrong way

The makers of Crocs have filed a new trade secret lawsuit against a former employee who allegedly left the company to start a rival footwear company that markets a strikingly similar and colorful rubber clog, The Fashion Law blog reported.

According to the lawsuit filed in a Colorado federal court on July 6, and accessed by the fashion news site, Crocs claims that Kellen McCarvel misappropriated the “use of… trade secrets and other proprietary and highly confidential business information that (he has) used without authorization to develop, manufacture, and market footwear products for the knockoff brand Joybees.”

Both Mr. McCarvel, who held a midlevel management position at Crocs until 2018, and Joybees LLC are named as defendants in the new lawsuit, according to the blog.

Croc claims shortly after leaving the company Mr. McCarvel launched Joybees, bringing with him “a tranche of several thousand documents containing Crocs’s highly confidential and proprietary business information, as well as the contents of an entire Crocs email account that McCarvel has never returned to Crocs.”