Cartier Sues Tiffany & Co For Allegedly Stealing Trade Secrets About Jewelry

Photo 218828874 © Manuel Milan Checa | Dreamstime.com

Cartier doesn’t have a dazzling image of Tiffany & Co, to say the least. On Monday, it took to a New York state court and sued the latter for supposedly stealing trade secrets via a former employee.

The complaint, directed at Tiffany & Co and Megan Marino, who worked for both brands, alleges that after Marino left her junior manager role at Cartier, she went on to Tiffany & Co, but not without downloading confidential information about Cartier’s high jewelry collection.

Marino was subsequently assigned by Tiffany & Co to work on its own high jewelry range, where pieces can cost anywhere from US$50,000 to US$10 million.

Cartier is accusing Marino of handing the downloaded trade secrets to her new Tiffany & Co coworkers. It also states in its suit that Tiffany & Co attempted to push the blame to its employee, and fired her after its legal department was contacted by Cartier.

Although Marino was forced out of the company a mere five weeks after joining Tiffany & Co, Cartier asserts that Tiffany & Co’s senior executives were still left with “a substantial amount of Cartier’s confidential and trade secret information.” It accuses Tiffany & Co of dabbling in a “disturbing culture of misappropriating competitive information.”

Marino expresses in an accompanying affidavit that Tiffany & Co had been “more interested in hiring me as a source of information than as a High Jewelry manager.”

In response, a spokesperson for Tiffany & Co has dismissed the allegations as “baseless,” telling Bloomberg that the company will fight back to “vigorously defend ourselves.

[via Bloomberg and Reuters, cover photo 218828874 © Manuel Milan Checa | Dreamstime.com]