Bonjour mes amis!
I started Bisous Bisous Pâtisserie in 2013 out of a true love and passion for French pastry. If you know my story, you know I left behind a career as a project manager to follow this dream of owning my own pastry shop in Dallas and becoming part of this community, sharing my love of pastry with those around me. Over the years, we were able to open our shop at West Village in 2015, expand to an offsite kitchen in 2017 and employ many aspiring pastry chefs along the way. I've fought and succeeded against bone cancer in 2018 and again in 2020 while enduring the damage to our business that the pandemic caused. We remained open, we continued to employ an amazing team and serve our customers through it all.
Earlier this year, we were made aware that there was a new business opening less than 2 miles from our shop, called Bisou, and they would be a restaurant serving brunch as well as a nightclub. Their address is on our same street, in our same city, using our trademarked name. We sought legal counsel and were advised that we had a very valid claim of infringement and sent the owners of the business a letter and a cease and desist as they were infringing upon our trademarked name and brand. We offered them the option of just renaming before they got too far down the path of construction and PR and were swiftly told they had no intention of making changes and that if we wanted to proceed, we could sue them.
We hoped it wouldn't come to that. We'd hoped we could wait it out, that the confusion wouldn't be too severe and that honestly, they might not even be in business in 6 months. Well, they opened in Dallas on 7/7/2021 and we awoke to a whole slue of very poor one star reviews on OUR pages by their customers. We've sought to have them removed, asked each person to take it down, but it's causing very real damage to our brand and all we've built with Bisous Bisous. We're now moving forward with litigation and we've been told it will be a minimum of 6 figures to go down this road and that in most cases, the legal fees aren't reimbursed as part of the settlements.
We're a small business with a staff of 20 people to consider and our success as a business means jobs for them. We take that responsibility very seriously. We ask that if you have it in you to donate to our legal fund, please help us continue working to share our love of pastry with our team and our community and know your donation will go directly to legal fees only. You have my word that we'll be very good stewards of the donations we receive. We appreciate any support you can provide and we're hopeful we can get through this ugly situation quickly so we can focus on bringing the best pastries to our city!