First published in Bay of Plenty Business News March 2025 edition
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Or, to be more accurate, in the state of Kmart.
At least according to Alex Gransbury, inventor and founder of Brisbane-based business, Dream Farm Pty Limited, which designed and sells a juicing device called the Fluicer.1
For those unfamiliar with the Fluicer, it is “an easy squeeze citrus juicer that folds completely flat for space-saving storage”. The Fluicer is truly distinctive and innovative – so much so that it was included in Time magazine’s list of best inventions of 2023.2 (The Fluicer has to be seen to be appreciated, so I recommend readers visit Dream Farm’s website page for the Fluicer at https://dreamfarm.com/fluicer/.)
Why is Mr Gransbury so aggrieved about Kmart? Because, Mr Gransbury alleges, Kmart has blatantly copied the Fluicer without his company’s permission. And, to add insult to injury, Kmart is retailing its unauthorised copy at 25% of the price of a Fluicer.3
According to an article published by Stuff4, Mr Gransbury said, “They’ve [Kmart] just taken the best-selling product that we’ve got and gone, ‘Yoink, thank you very much’. It’s un-Australian, and kind of disgusting and disappointing.”
Strong words, I’m sure you’ll agree, to which a spokesperson from Kmart replied, “We conduct thorough checks during the product ranging and development process, to ensure we are not infringing the rights of others”.4
And there’s the rub.
Neither Mr Gransbury, personally, nor Dream Farm have any registered patent or design protection in Australia for the Fluicer. According to the Stuff article, Dream Farm chose to patent the Fluicer in Europe and the US, but not in its home market of Australia because of the cost of securing IP protection. As a result, Dream Farm left the door wide open to Kmart to walk in and launch its own, cheaper version of the Fluicer apparently without consequence.
(Note: If Kmart thinks Dream Farm has no IP rights in Australia, it should think again – Dream Farm could still potentially stop Kmart and seek compensation under Australia’s equivalent of NZ’s Fair Trading Act, the Australia Consumer Law.)
I can empathise with Mr Gransbury and his company; what Kmart has allegedly done is not ‘fair dinkum’. But I can only empathise so far, for there are (at least) two universal truths in IP: the first is that if a piece of IP is potentially valuable, then it is worth protecting, even if that means channelling finances to IP protection rather than to stock or marketing; the second is that success breeds infringement (or at least heightens the risk of it), so Mr Gransbury should not have been surprised when Kmart allegedly went ‘Yoink, thank you very much’.
Too many businesses like Dream Farm think that securing registered IP protection is an optional cost. Wrong. Securing registered IP protection when and wherever possible is not an optional cost – it is an essential investment. The cost needs to be built into the business plan and prioritised, for if you don’t have registered protection when it is available to you then your IP house is built on sand and the tide of competition, whether un-Australian or un-Kiwi or otherwise, is just waiting to come in and wash your foundations away.
If you are a design-led business and want to know more about IP rights and how you can potentially avoid the kind of situation Dream Farm is in, you can contact me for a confidential, no obligation conversation.
- https://dreamfarm.com/fluicer/
- https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-2023/
- AU$5 for the Kmart ‘folding juicer’ versus AU$19.95 for an original Fluicer, as at 19 February 2025
- https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/360582761/australian-mans-invention-was-global-hit-then-he-saw-it-kmart-5, by Jamila Filippone and originally published in Sydney Morning Herald
