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Wauwatosa remodeler accuses former sales consultant of stealing company’s identity

By: Alex Zank//August 17, 2017//

Wauwatosa remodeler accuses former sales consultant of stealing company’s identity

By: Alex Zank//August 17, 2017//

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A Wauwatosa remodeler is accusing a former employee of deceptively using the company’s logos to steal leads from trade shows and benefit his own businesses.

Knutson Bros. Design-Build LLC has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court’s Eastern Wisconsin District alleging that Troy Fullerton established his own company named KB Roofing in September without his employer’s knowledge or consent. Fullerton worked for Knutson Bros. as an independent sales consultant from 2015 to the fall of 2016.

When he started the company, Fullerton had set up a Knutson Bros. booth at a home-remodeling trade show. But rather than representing his former employer, he was distributing his own sales brochures that included Knutson Bros.’s photographs, logo and text; his former employer’s contact information and website address had been swapped out with his own.

Other marketing materials Fullerton produced for KB Roofing used the same blue-block-style lettering as Knutson Bros., and the materials falsely stated underneath that KB Roofing was “a division of Knutson Bros. Design-Build.”

What’s more, the URL of the website he had created, www.KnutsonBrothers.com, was “deceptively similar” to the one used by Knutson Bros., www.KnutsonBros.com, according to the complaint filed with the lawsuit.

The complaint accuses Fullerton of setting up other websites with the same deceptive intent. Among them were www.KBRoofs.com, www.kb-designbuild.com and possibly others.

Knutson Bros. alleges that Fullerton produced these marketing materials and website addresses to deceive clients into believing KB Roofing was in some way associated with the company.

These tactics are so deceptive, alleges Knutson Bros., that the company has received phone calls from customers who wanted to complain about the quality of Fullerton’s work and mistakenly thought they had been doing business with Knutson Bros.

Knutson Bros.’s website even includes a warning telling clients that their company has nothing to do with Fullerton and his business. The warning also states Fullerton established KB Roofing after another business that had he owned, Meyer Construction, was shut down.

The lawsuit accuses Fullerton of infringing on a trademark, cybersquatting, competing unfairly and providing false representation, breaching his duty of loyalty and stealing trade secrets. It asks the court to ban Fullerton from using Knutson Bros.’s trademarks and calls on him to disgorge any gains his company obtained from these practices and to pay back three times his profits to Knutson Bros.

Attempts to reach Fullerton were unsuccessful Thursday.

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