Helping deliver a newborn business
08 November 2016
Protecting IP to ward off copycats
When Sinead O’Donovan couldn’t find a garment that helped her recover following the caesarean birth of her first child, she decided to create her own.
She found that regular sports shorts didn’t provide the pressure and support she needed to help with her recovery. Shape wear was too tight and also not good for recovering muscles so she decided that a specific garment, designed for purpose, was what women needed.
Applying her background in science and biomechanics, Sinead and her fashion designer sister Carmella set about designing a pair of shorts that would suit her needs and those of other women in similar situations.
They created their own fabric that provided continuous, low level compression and identified where the pressure panels needed to be placed to provide the best recovery benefits.
Two years later they had a prototype and the now popular SRC Recovery Shorts were born.
“It would have been easy to give up but my passion was to bring something to the market that I knew in my heart of hearts would significantly help women post birth,” Sinead says.
“There really wasn’t a product available that was designed for purpose that simultaneously deals with a range of issues related to child birth.”
Sinead came to Griffith Hack around 2008-09 seeking an opinion as to whether hers and Carmella’s design was innovative and novel and able to be patented in Australia and overseas.
While there were other compression garments on the market, Griffith Hack educated patent examiners on why Sinead’s recovery shorts were different.
The shorts are now patented in Australia, USA, China and under final consideration in Europe. Griffith Hack also works with Sinead on trade marks for her business, SRC Health.
Inevitably Sinead’s products attracted copycats.
“Before her patents were even granted copycat products began appearing on the local and international markets,” Griffith Hack Principal Nadia Odorico says.
“This required us to quickly secure SRC Health’s IP rights, including patents. Without those patents Sinead would have had no leverage with which to approach those copycats.”
Sinead has gone on to create SRC Pregnancy Shorts (also patented) for women to wear during pregnancy to help ease pelvic and lower back pain and swelling and varicose veins. Her business has also created compression garments for sport and surgical recovery for men and women.
“Our patents protect the uniqueness of our products and the value of our business,” she says.
