Startup battling Tiger Woods-backed brand has Richmond ties

Jack Karavich’s Tigeraire logo (left) is in a heated trademark dispute with Tiger Woods’ Sun Day Red brand. (Illustration by Liz Thurston/Richmond BizSense)

It turns out the startup that’s been making national headlines for its legal battle with a Tiger Woods-backed golf apparel brand has ties to Richmond.

Tigeraire, which sells a line of clip-on fans for athletes and construction workers, keeps dual offices in Louisiana and Henrico County.

That’s because Tigeraire founder and CEO Jack Karavich lives in northern Henrico with his wife and kids and splits his time between here and Baton Rouge, where he started the company in 2020 with a goal of helping the Louisiana State University Tigers football team stay cool in the Louisiana heat.

Now, nearly five years later, Karavich and his 23-person firm are combating a different sort of heat involving a different type of Tiger.

Tigeraire is going head-to-head in federal court with Sun Day Red, an apparel company owned by golf industry giant TaylorMade and whose spokesman is none other than golf great Tiger Woods.

Their fight is a tale of two tiger logos, with Tigeraire claiming its established trademark is being infringed upon by Sun Day Red’s recently launched brand.

Sun Day Red, so named for Woods’ famous habit of wearing red on the final day of golf tournaments, typically Sundays, claims Tigeraire is merely a small player looking for an easy payday by alleging the two companies’ logos are confusingly similar.

“This case, unfortunately, presents the time-worn circumstance of an opportunistic, misguided business attempting to extract an unwarranted financial windfall from a larger and more successful brand, based on threats of legal action and demands for exorbitant sums,” Sun Day Red said in a recent filing in California federal court.

Tigeraire’s logo

Karavich, who previously worked for major Richmond employer Capital One, said his small company is in a David versus Goliath-type situation.

“We’re fighting this false narrative they’re creating that we’re out for a payday,” Karavich said of Sun Day Red in a recent interview with BizSense. “They know damn well that’s not the case. This case comes down to a trademark protection case, plain and simple.”

The two sides have traded legal filings in federal courts in California and Louisiana in recent weeks, but their dispute had been building since earlier this year when Sun Day Red made its public debut and Tigeraire was struck by what it says are wrongful similarities in the logos.

Tigeraire refers to its logo in court filings as the “leaping tiger design,” while Sun Day Red describes its logo as a “fanciful tiger with fifteen stripes, each stripe symbolizing one of Tiger Woods’s fifteen major championship victories.”

Tigeraire said it has used the mark for five years, while Sun Day Red says it filed its trademark applications in July 2023 and launched the brand publicly in February 2024.

Tigeraire argues that Sun Day Red’s logo is “strikingly similar” to its own, while Sun Day Red argues there’s an “obvious dissimilarity.”

Tigeraire claims brand confusion between the two began in earnest when Sun Day Red was being marketed at The Masters golf tournament earlier this year. There, Tigeraire claims, its representatives were wearing their Tigeraire branded apparel, which attendees mistook for Sun Day Red.

Tigeraire argues that the confusion and alleged damage to its brand has only gotten worse since then.

“The economic power behind Sunday Red, through its partnership with Tiger Woods and TaylorMade, has already overwhelmed the marketplace power and value of Tigeraire’s trademark rights,” Tigeraire argued in its trademark infringement filing in September.

Sun Day Red pushed back, claiming “reverse confusion” and alleging that Tigeraire hadn’t been promoting its products for golf and also hadn’t been focused on apparel until it became aware of Sun Day Red.

It claims Tigeraire then began attending golf tournaments and marketing its products to golfers “and frantically added apparel to its products offerings – all in a clear attempt to manufacture the appearance of overlap where none existed in the actual marketplace.”

Tigeraire claims it expanded its product line to include products for golfers in the latter half of 2023, prior to Sun Day Red’s launch. It claims it provided its fans to amateur and pro golfers, including David Toms and members of the LSU golf team, and attended the PGA Show trade show in January 2024.

Before going to court, the two sides tried unsuccessfully to find common ground. They engaged in settlement discussions until as recently as September, just prior to their respective legal filings.

Tigeraire sent a cease-and-desist letter to Sun Day Red just weeks after its public launch and then filed a letter of protest with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to try to block Sun Day Red’s logo from getting formal trademark approval.

Sun Day Red claims Tigeraire’s protest was denied by the USPTO and that Tigeraire’s counsel sent Sun Day Red an “over-the-top monetary demand” in September.

That’s when the formal court battle began, with Sun Day Red firing the first shot on Sept. 26 with a pre-emptive motion asking a federal judge in California to declare it has not infringed and that there is no likelihood of consumer confusion.

The next day, Tigeraire filed its lawsuit against Sun Day Red in federal court in Louisiana, alleging trademark infringement, unfair competition, injury to business reputation and other counts. It asks for an unspecified amount of damages and to prevent Sun Day Red from using the tiger image in the near term and permanently.

It was ultimately ruled that Tigeraire’s case in Louisiana must be put on hold until the action in California federal court plays out.

A request seeking comment from TaylorMade was not returned by press time.

Jack Karavich

Karavich, in an interview last month with BizSense, discussed his company’s origins and how it came to have a presence in the Richmond region.

He said Tigeraire was born out of his garage in Louisiana during the early days of the pandemic in 2020.

It started in partnership with LSU football, which at the time was frantically searching for ideas on how to keep its players cool while having to wear masks at the same time as their football helmets at the height of Covid restrictions.

A native of New York, Karavich grew up in Northern Virginia and describes himself as a “lifelong builder and tinkerer.”

He said he heard about LSU’s conundrum and hit on the idea of small but powerful fans that could slip into the Tiger’s helmets and made prototypes. He said the players called them “helmet air conditioners.”

While the strictest Covid measures were ultimately lifted and the masks went away, Karavich said the fans had staying power.

“We realized they were putting it on even when they didn’t have the plastic face covering,” Karavich said of the football team. “That’s when we all looked at each other and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this feels like it could be a product.’”

As Karavich continued to turn the idea into a full-blown business, his wife’s career brought him and his family to reside in the Richmond area in 2021. He and his wife had lived here previously more than a decade ago, when they both worked for Capital One.

As Tigeraire continued to grow, Karavich kept its office in Baton Rouge while opening a Richmond-area outpost. It initially had a small office at 1521 W. Main St. in the city, before leasing a 2,600-square-foot office at 11551 Nuckols Road in the Twin Hickory area of Henrico.

Tigeraire’s office in Henrico County.

The bulk of its employees and customers are in Louisiana, as are most of its investors – Tigeraire has raised about $6 million in capital to date, Karavich said.

The company has since expanded its products beyond the confines of football helmets, marketing the fans to construction workers for their hard hats and for other sports, including, most recently, golf.

Karavich recalled his reaction to seeing the Sun Day Red logo for the first time earlier this year.

“Immediately seeing that brand announcement it was like, ‘Holy shit, this looks just like our logo,’” he said.

One of Tigeraire’s clip-on fans.

He claims it wasn’t until Tigeraire was peddling its brand at The Masters in the spring that the company saw attendees confusing the two brands.

“That’s when we realized we have a really serious problem. I left in the middle of the day to shoot an email to our IP attorneys,” he said.

Karavich claims Sun Day Red initially ignored Tigeraire’s outreach about the logo issue and that his company didn’t immediately want to escalate the situation.

“We weren’t trying to get into a battle with Tiger Woods,” he said.

Eventually, discussions of a royalty deal began, but Karavich claims Sun Day Red’s offer was a nonstarter.

“They asked us to sign away our rights for zero dollars,” he said.

Additional discussions of royalties and other resolutions ultimately were ineffective, and now the court battle has ensued.

Karavich said Sun Day Red and TaylorMade, the latter of which is owned by Korean private equity firm Centroid Investment Partners, aims to bleed Tigeraire to death with legal fees.

“They’re sparing no expense to bury us in an old school way. You just keep spending until the little guy can’t spend anymore,” he said.

But with two dozen employees on the payroll, a new product launch in the works and a production capacity of 25,000 fans per month, Karavich said Tigeraire has no plans of giving up without a fight.

“We have the temperament that we’re not going to back down. We’re not going to walk away from this because we have the facts on our side,” he said. “Our perspective is: chin up, charge the mountain.”