CRAFTS : 2-Day Seminar Helps Entrepreneurs Make Business of Pleasure

A seminar promising valuable tips on succeeding in the craft business will be held Feb. 25 and 26 at the Sequoia Conference Center in Buena Park.

Speakers at the Crafters Conference, scheduled from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, will discuss legal matters critical to crafters; display, sales and marketing skills; credit card services; mailing list development; bookkeeping; and taxes and insurance.

Information on local companies that mechanically stuff fabric items or do die-cutting (producing identical multiple elements) will be offered, and representatives from 16 craft malls will attend, said conference organizer Marsha Reed, editor of the 6-year-old Craftmaster News, a Downey-based, monthly publication that lists craft shows throughout California and in some surrounding states.

“There’s a lot of people out there getting started in the craft business,” Reed said, “and they don’t know about the services available to them or how to save money or time.”

Seasoned crafters may also benefit from the conference, said Reed and keynote speaker Leonard D. Du Boff, a Portland lawyer and authority on craft law who has written several books on the subject. Du Boff, who is scheduled to speak from 8:30 to 10:30 each morning, plans to discuss trademark, copyright and other legal protections for crafters and other industry personnel, such as gallery owners.

“Most of the laws I’ll be talking about have changed significantly in the past few years,” he said, “and keeping up to date is important.”

Du Boff, who regularly contributes articles to craft publications, said he’ll discuss a comparatively new form of legal protection called trade dress. It’s similar to copyright, which, however, does not cover functional objects and is therefore unavailable to many crafters, he said.

Trade dress (a term derived from the concept of “dressing a product up for trade”) protects crafters if a company or individual appropriates the overall “look and feel” of their work, he said. (Copyright protection requires that identical or “substantially identical” copies of a product are made.)

For example, the small, Colorado-based Blue Mountain Greeting Card Co. won a suit against the mammoth Hallmark Cards Inc. under trade dress, after Hallmark appropriated Blue Mountain’s color scheme, decorative style and text format featuring short, romantic statements, Du Boff said.

Hallmark “took the look and feel, the essence” of Blue Mountain’s cards, he said. “If you saw these cards, you’d say: ‘Oh, Blue Mountain has expanded their line.’ ”

No preregistration is necessary to obtain trade dress protection, Du Boff said, but crafters must “adopt an identifiable, uniform, consistent format. That is their trade dress.”

Legal knowledge is more important than ever to crafters in the current litigious climate, he said.

“Disputes that at one time would be solved over a cup of coffee are today being fought out in court,” he said. “If you want to remain in business and enjoy that situation, you have to be aware.”

The first annual Crafters Conference, featuring about a dozen speakers from Orange and Los Angeles counties, will be held next Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Sequoia Conference Center, 7530 Orangethorpe Ave., Buena Park. Registration at the door is $60 for both days. Information: (310) 869-5882.