TL;DR: Wawa suing New Jersey convenience store named Dawa for infringement of copyright, citing that their name and wordmark is too similar to theirs
I’m torn – on one side of the field is Wawa, the convenience chain that I went to a lot when I got my license, whose sandwiches and iced tea I love more than many people on the planet. But on the other side, Dawa is Korean owned and operated, and I always have a soft spot in my heart for my people just trying to make a living and minding their own business.
Ultimately, as much as it pains me to take the side against Koreans, the reality is that they don’t really have much ground to stand on when it comes to going up against a vastly larger company such as Wawa. And honestly, Wawa’s not wrong, since Dawa’s storefront and wordmark are pretty much copied straight out of Wawa’s identity.
The defense isn’t wrong, and “dawa” in Korean (다와) is roughly translated to “come all,” which is a pretty positive name for a convenience store, but the unfortunate reality is that when the day is over, Wawa came first, and they have the high ground when it comes to who gets to use the goofy-sounding word and what all imitators are based off of.
Back in the day, there used to be something of an urban myth in Korean communities, that Wawa was ultimately named by Koreans, because of the perpetuating stereotype that Koreans ran convenience stores, many of them Wawas, and the tendency for Koreans to use the phrase “wa-wa” as in “come-come” in a rushed manner.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter as Dawa has already conceded their name and will eventually change to something that doesn’t quite sound so much like their geese-based competitors. Honestly, they should just change their sign to the actual written Korean of Dawa, and let their existing customer base continue to come and call it Dawa, while attracting older Korean customers by appearing as a Korean business. They don’t have to truly forfeit their name, and Wawa can get off their nuts for having a wordmark that looks too similar to theirs.
