Until he discovered what he calls “the glassware community,” Nick Rex was struggling to find an outlet for his art. A tattoo apprentice who’s also taken graphic design classes, Rex had drawn tattoo flash art and illustrated a few children’s e-books for his daughter. But neither of those endeavors was getting him close to his goal: to make art that people wanted to incorporate into their daily lives. Then, while using the beer rating app Untappd three years ago, he discovered the cartoon- and pop-culture-splashed world of online, small-batch, designer beer glassware.
“Now instead of just drawing and not having a purpose for it … it’s a purpose,” Rex says. He has a full-time plastics manufacturing job and also attends school full-time, and describes designing beer glassware as a hobby for him. (He does make a few dollars per glass selling his designs.) “As an artist, how often do you get to say that your art’s all over the world and that people are enjoying it and taking photos of it?”
Rex, who lives in Michigan and sells his glassware as Rextacular Sipware, is just one of the people designing, selling, and collecting beer glasses as part of a relatively tight-knit subculture that also toes the line of legality. The most popular of these glasses feature original illustrations that blend legally protected pop culture characters with visual elements related to beer: Ren and Stimpy with a beer mug, Where The Wild Things Are’s King Max with a border of hop cones around him, Pac-Man rebranded as Hop-Man. They’re printed in small batches ranging from 48 to 144 glasses, and sold online by the artists for about $20 each.
The designers say they’re mostly in it for the camaraderie and status within their small corner of the internet—not for the money. But the reality is that there is money to be made from glassware collectors rabid for the next design that references The Notorious B.I.G. or Beavis and Butt-Head. A spokesperson for Grandstand Glassware and Apparel, the company that prints the vast majority of these glasses, calls this kind of custom glassware “money on the table that [companies] can grab.”
But because companies or artists are making money off designs that reference someone else’s intellectual property (IP), that raises questions of legality, liability, and how long this gray area can exist before corporate lawyers notice—or if they care at all.
Pop culture references are central to the designer glassware market. Ryan Galiotto, a Pittsburgh-based glassware designer and founder of online beer community Fueled By Hops, says original artwork that doesn’t include pop culture characters just doesn’t sell. That means that, for many designers, the risk of violating a law is worth it.
“Some of these [cartoon design] glasses that I put out would sell out in two, three minutes. Most of my original designs, I’m still sitting on,” he says.
He attributes the popularity of the pop culture glasses to two emotions: “It’s nostalgia and FOMO.” The nostalgia is for favorite shows or books or musical artists; the FOMO stands for the “fear of missing out” on being able to purchase these small-batch designs. Some of the earliest Fueled By Hops glass designs included characters like Tyrone Biggums and Rick James from “Chappelle’s Show.”
The resulting questions about IP theft aren’t new in craft beer. Similar debates have also arisen about brewery label artwork, where nostalgic, pop-culture-inspired imagery is rife.
“We put them in the glassware groups and it caught fire; we sold them out,” Galiotto says. “People who bought that character wanted a new character. That’s the basics of how we got going.”
Last year, though, Galiotto made a decision to stop using cartoon characters on his designs. He saw the IP issues as too great a risk for a growing company.
In a December 2020 post titled “Why I’m moving away from IP theft in our merch,” which Galiotto published on Fueled By Hops’ blog, he wrote: “Growing a business while living in daily fear of a cease-and-desist doesn’t seem very fun. And honestly, the energy we would put into navigating a C&D would be much better served elsewhere in the growth of the company.”
Collecting glassware, he and Rex say, is about status within the glassware community. Drinkers share photos of newly acquired glasses in Facebook groups, on Instagram (see #dopeglass for examples), and on Untappd, but Facebook is where much of the discussion and community-building happens. Rex says the primary beer and bourbon Facebook group he’s a part of, called The Laundry Room, includes roughly 900 members and is “incredibly tight-knit.” He says group moderators don’t have to do much because “everyone knows each other.” Rex says that while the primary focus is beer and bourbon, it’s really “anything goes” in terms of the discussion there; he even sold a vehicle through the group.
That personal connection made designer glassware seem less like a business for Galiotto, and more like a hobby or a community-building activity. Yet he was still running it like a business: Galiotto used to aim for two glassware releases per month, usually of about 72 to 144 pieces each. He says the communal nature is changing, though, as newcomers see money to be made off such designs.
“We had kind of a code, you know. If I was doing [a glass featuring] ‘Chappelle’s Show,’ the other guys would steer clear of that and do ‘South Park,’” Galiotto says. “Now there’s so many new designers, the code’s not being followed, if you will.”
There’s a bit of irony here: At one point, glassware designers respected each others’ “ownership” of a certain set of characters—while neither of them actually owned the rights to make money off those characters.
As this type of glassware became more popular, more designers saw money to be made.
“We noticed a big uptick in a lot of smaller retailers who just, kind of as a hobby, are designing these super cool glasses and selling them,” says Lauren Ewing, account manager for Grandstand Glassware and Apparel. She says that since Grandstand began printing full-color glassware a few years ago, the company has seen these orders increase from 600 the first year to 3,200 last year. “We also have breweries, too, starting to do more cool retail commemorative glassware.”
It’s not clear whether the breweries Ewing references are all using pop culture characters, but at least some breweries are. They include The Answer Brewpub in Richmond, Virginia, which released this glass with Nintendo character Yoshi on it. The Richmond Times-Dispatch calls such limited glasses “almost as popular as the beer itself.”
“Glassware, you can do at a pretty good MSRP for a pretty good profit for these customers,” Ewing says, referencing the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.
But Rex and Galiotto push back on that claim, saying that most individual glassware designers are barely breaking even on their designs.
Rex sells his glasses for $20 each, which includes shipping. He says the glasses cost him $5 each to print; packing supplies and shipping to customers costs him $9-$10 per glass; and Shopify, his ecommerce site provider, charges him $1 per transaction. He says he makes $3 or $4 per glass, if that. He typically orders 96 glasses of each design, because the printer requires him to order in multiples of 48. That’s a total of $288-$384 in profit for hours of design and shipping work. Designers who sell in larger quantities, of course, can make more money, but that potentially jeopardizes the ultra-exclusive, small-batch nature of these glasses.
“It’s not about the financial aspect of it, it’s about feeling the achievement or satisfaction that I made a product and I’m shipping it out,” Rex says.
While that may be what personally motivates Rex, a corporate lawyer likely wouldn’t care—to them, he’s running a business that potentially infringes on others’ IP, no matter how much or how little he makes.
Galiotto adds that any margins that exist for designers on paper disappear when you factor in the time it takes to create and ship glasses. (He also says that he donated a portion of his glassware sales to local COVID-19 relief efforts and to the Brooklyn Community Foundation.) Galiotto has bigger plans for Fueled By Hops, hoping to turn it into a beer community website that also produces events, a podcast, a blog, and more, which is part of the reason he moved away from using pop culture references in his designs.
In his 2020 blog post announcing that decision, though, Galiotto goes out of his way to say that he doesn’t expect other designers to follow his lead: “I’m not knocking anybody in the industry who ‘walks the line’ with IP theft. If that’s what you think is best for your business, by all means, continue. I’m certainly not mad at you and honestly, I’ll continue to support you.”
But John Szymankiewicz, a beer attorney based in Raleigh, North Carolina, told the GBH podcast last year that IP theft is not what’s best for a small business. Whether it’s a brewery printing a sports team’s logo on a label or a company selling a glass with Bart Simpson’s face on it, the small company is taking a legal risk.
“When you know that you are blatantly using somebody else’s mark or trade dress or similarity or calling it something else that’s not yours, you should expect that somebody might be upset about that,” Szymankiewicz told the GBH podcast.
Rex is nonchalant about the legal risks of using, for example, Ren and Stimpy in his designs. He says he deliberately doesn’t use the words Ren or Stimpy on the glass to avoid provoking the copyright holder (Viacom). He says he also adds additional elements—like a beer glass or hop cone—to the drawing to make them more than “identical clones.” This is a defense he and Galiotto both reference: These designs are homages or parodies, not theft.
But Brendan Palfreyman, who specializes in brewery trademarks as an attorney at Syracuse, New York’s Harris Beach PLLC, says slightly modifying a character is still legally dicey. The legal test, he says, is “substantial similarity, which encompasses more than exact copies.”
And Galiotto’s assertion that such glasses are homages, not theft, is contradicted by the fact that he explicitly stopped producing such glassware for fear of legal action. Additionally, few glassware designers use the name of the actual characters they’re referencing: This sold-out glass from sipnproper.com featuring Kang and Kodos from “The Simpsons” simply describes them as aliens. It’s a contradictory defense: Artists say what they’re doing isn’t theft, but they still take steps to obscure what they’re doing. If all else fails, designers assert that they’ll just stop selling whatever glass a company takes exception to.
“I’ve never heard of anyone getting notified for a C&D, or sued, but if it happens, it happens,” Rex says.
Breweries commonly use this reasoning when using others’ IP on beer labels: They say it’s defensible because it’s on a limited-edition, small-batch product that’s only released once. But companies who own the IP can still take serious action. Last year, The Hershey Company demanded Side Lot Brewery in Wauconda, Illinois, pay roughly $8,000 in profits it made from using—and advertising—Jolly Ranchers and Milk Duds candies in its beers.
GBH contacted The Walt Disney Company, Nintendo, The Maurice Sendak Foundation, Universal Press Syndicate, and Viacom to ask whether they have ever issued cease and desists to glassware makers who incorporate some of their imagery. Nintendo declined to comment; the rest did not respond to requests.
For its part, printing company Grandstand says the artists assume all liability for their drawings.
“We kind of pass that liability on to the customer as far as that goes,” Ewing says. However, she could not definitively say whether that policy was written anywhere. Ewing later emailed Good Beer Hunting to say that, in fact, the policy is written on the company’s Frequently Asked Questions page: “Grandstand is not responsible for gathering, maintaining or verifying the copyright status of customer-provided files. All print customers are responsible for obtaining permission to use, duplicate, and/or edit all copyrighted material prior to submitting said files to Grandstand; and must provide written permission upon request.”
For now, Rex thinks he’s small enough to avoid raising the ire of large entertainment companies. (“I’m a crumb in this world right now,” is how he puts it.) But if, as Grandstand asserts, more designers and breweries are ordering these types of custom glasses, the entertainment industry’s eye could become more watchful and litigious. Much of that could depend on whether such companies see popular, small-batch glassware as a niche artistic expression, or more like a cottage industry.
Galiotto envisions a third scenario: The glassware market simply burns itself out, and drinkers turn to other products. It’s partially why Galiotto is hedging his glass bets and expanding Fueled by Hops into other products, content, and events.
“There’s only so much glass you can fit in your cabinet,” he says. “We just had bigger plans for the brand.”
Words by Kate Bernot