What does it mean that our chair is a registered design?

You may have noticed that the Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair carries a registered EU design number: 015139395-0001.

But what does that actually mean? And if our design is protected, why might you still come across other chairs that look similar?

Design protection can be confusing, so we wanted to explain what it means - and what it doesn't.

The Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair is our own design, developed by Mamine Living and registered and protected within the European Union.

A registered design protects the appearance of a product. But it doesn't mean that we suddenly own the concept of a nursing chair, a recliner, or a cream-coloured piece of furniture.

And we wouldn't want it to.

Design evolves because people reinterpret familiar objects in new ways.

What our registration does allow us to protect is our specific design and the overall visual impression it creates.

If we believe another company has produced a design that infringes those registered rights, we will take the appropriate legal action to protect what we have created.

This is where design protection becomes a little more nuanced.

Two products can share many characteristics without necessarily being considered the same design from a legal perspective.

Think about fashion.

Almost every major fashion house has created a trench coat at some point.

They might share a double-breasted front, waist belt, lapels, storm flap and neutral colour. Put two of them next to each other and they may look remarkably similar.

That doesn't automatically mean one infringes the other's design rights.

At the same time, copying somebody else's protected design and making a few superficial changes doesn't automatically make it acceptable either.

There isn't a rule that says “change three details and it isn't a copy anymore.”

When assessing registered designs, what matters includes the overall impression created by the designs in question.

Furniture works in much the same way.

We have too.

Since launching Mamine, we've seen more chairs enter the market that at first glance can feel very familiar.

And naturally, we've received questions from customers about them.

We understand why.

Our design isn't intentionally unusual for the sake of being unusual. We wanted the Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair to feel timeless - something that could sit naturally in a Scandinavian home without immediately looking like a piece of specialist baby furniture.

That means we're working within a familiar furniture language.

But there is a difference between designing within the same aesthetic and reproducing a protected design.

Where we believe that boundary has been crossed, we will protect our intellectual property.

Where another product is simply similar, that's part of operating within a creative industry.

We've received particular questions since Twistshake introduced its Avena nursing chair not long after Mamine launched ours, as some customers have noticed that the two chairs look similar at first glance.

To be clear, the Twistshake Avena is not the Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair, and it is not manufactured by our manufacturer.

We have, however, found a chair for sale through Alibaba that appears visually identical to the Twistshake Avena model.

The Alibaba chair is offered by a furniture manufacturer to other businesses as a ready-made product that can be customised and sold under their own brand. This is commonly known as white labelling.

What is a white label product?

Put simply, a white label product is a product that already exists at a manufacturer and can be bought by a company, branded with its own name and then sold to its customers.

For example, rather than spending time developing a completely new chair, a company could find an existing chair from a furniture manufacturer, choose its fabric and colour, add its branding and sell it as part of its own collection.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Lots of businesses use white label products. It's simply very different from developing your own design from the ground up.

And this is where we think transparency matters.

A chair that appears visually identical to the Twistshake Avena can currently be found through Alibaba as a product available for other businesses to buy and customise.

The timing has understandably raised questions too. Twistshake introduced its chair relatively shortly after we introduced ours. Developing an original piece of furniture from the ground up normally involves design work, prototypes, sampling, testing, revisions and preparation for production - a process we know well because we went through it ourselves.

However, we don't know when Twistshake began developing its chair or what their internal development process looked like, so we won't claim to know something we cannot verify.

And while we can show that a visually matching chair is offered through Alibaba, that alone does not prove that Twistshake buys its chair from that particular supplier or that its chair is a white label product. Twistshake would need to answer those questions themselves.

What we can tell you with certainty is how the Mamine chair came to be.

Our chair was developed by us, according to our own design and specifications. It is not a ready-made chair we found in a manufacturer's catalogue and put the Mamine name on. Our design is registered and protected within the European Union.

And while similar chairs may continue to appear, we'll always be transparent about where ours came from. And that is the story we can confidently stand behind.

The Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair began long before Mamine Living officially launched.

It started with our own experiences of becoming mothers.

When you're expecting a baby, you create an entire environment around this little person you haven't even met yet.

The cot.
The pram.
The changing table.
The clothes.
The nursery.

Almost everything is designed around them.

And we kept coming back to one question:

Where was the furniture designed around her?

We wanted somewhere that combined the comfort and functionality of a proper recliner with the softer, more considered aesthetic we wanted in our own homes.

So we created it.

We developed the Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair around the realities of pregnancy and early motherhood, considering its comfort, proportions, materials, functionality and the small details that matter when you're feeding a baby or spending hours with a newborn asleep against your chest.

That development became the Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair you see today.

In fact, we'd love to see more of the interiors industry start designing around mothers.

Our ambition with Mamine has always been bigger than one chair. We want to help establish maternity interiors as a category in its own right.

Furniture created with the mother in mind, not as an afterthought to the nursery.

So there will be other nursing chairs.

There will be other beautiful recliners.

There will be products with similar functions, colours and aesthetics.

And that's okay.

But when inspiration crosses the line into infringement of our protected design, we will defend what we've created.

And when you come across a chair that reminds you of ours, we hope you'll remember where the Mamine Living story began.

With two mothers in Sweden, their own experience of motherhood, and one simple thought:

So much is designed for the baby. It was time to design something for her. 🤍

The Mamine Adjustable Nursing Chair: designed by Mamine Living. Registered and protected in the European Union. EU design registration no. 015139395-0001.