We walked into Taylor’s Refresher recently and was like…uh….where’s Taylor’s?
In what looks like a rather ugly split, Taylor’s Refresher has been renamed er…Gott’s Roadside Tray Gourmet. Apparently, the owners, Joel and Duncan Gott, got into a legal spat with the Taylor daughters about trademarking the name Taylor’s Automatic Refresher with the Taylors who own the trademark of Taylor’s Refresher. Since the Gott’s likely have more expansion ideas in their heads and they can’t expand with something they can’t trademark, they changed the names of their Napa, St. Helena, and San Francisco locations. Now, the Taylors are raising a big stink about changing the name and how it hurts the legacy of the name. Meanwhile, the Gott’s don’t own the St. Helena property; they just lease it from…the Taylors.
It will be interesting to see what happens when that lease expires. I’m going to take a wild guess that the Gotts want to expand Taylors into a chain of sorts, but the Taylor’s wanted more say (or money) and blocked the trademark. The Gott’s probably thought that they were more behind the success of Taylor’s (they did buy the failing St.Helena location in the late 90s and turned it around) rather than the name and didn’t like being blocked like this so why not just cut the name? It’ll be interesting to see if they’re right. There’s a tremendous amount of value regionally (and possibly nationally for the people who visited from out of state) in that Taylor brand.
We were talking to some people at Taylor’s, and apparently, the Gott’s bused staff in from the Napa and St. Helena locations last week to San Francisco to let them in on the news (odd they didn’t buss the SF staff up to North Bay…) where decked out in a new Gott uniform, they told everyone that all Taylor stuff in all the restaurants had to be replaced ASAP. Pity.
Apparently out of like 100 names, Gott’s Roadside Tray Gourmet, was the winner. Yech. I’d hate to see what the other 99 were. We went there recently, and it looked pretty packed to me.
Anyway, if you want the gory details:
- San Francisco Chronicle’s spin on things
- Napa Valley Register talk about the name change and the Taylor’s family response to it.
Nuts. Guess I have to copy the Taylor’s review over to a Gott version and do a find and replace…