There is something about the fight that is embroiling New York’s Sex and the City spin-off business that Candace Bushnell, the show’s originator and a keen observer of the spikier side of human behaviour, would find wryly amusing.
Two companies offering tours of Manhattan hotspots frequented by Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha — the characters of the hit HBO series and soon-to-be movie — are locked in a legal dispute over the brand.
Which is odd because they appear to be worlds apart.
In the blue corner is On Location Tours, a veteran of the Sex and the City obsession industry that takes dozens of the show’s fans (largely women) on three-hour bus tours. The trip intersperses visits to shops, bars and the cupcake store where Miranda went when she needed a sugar fix, with video clips of the Emmy award-winning series. Price of tour: $40.
In the red corner is Destination on Location travel, which is offering an upmarket version of the Sex and the City experience timed to coincide with the film’s United States premiere. Between eight and 12 women will be whizzed around town for five nights and given the fantasy that they are actually one of the four glamorous characters before attending the premiere and after-party. Price of tour: $24 000.
The $40 tour operator is unhappy about what it perceives as intrusion on its brand. It has instructed lawyers to look into issuing a lawsuit for infringement of copyright and trademark.
‘We have been in business for seven years building the brand and now this new venture is causing lots of confusion,” On Location Tours said. It said several people had called the company enquiring about the $24 000 offering.
The big-bucks variety has been put together by Joanne Konstantinakos, who characterises her venture as luxury tours aimed at a very different clientele. ‘It’s one thing to be affluent, it’s another to have access. We are creating a real-life fantasy — and that’s very powerful for women.”
The On Location Tours bus drives past Soho House, the members-only club where Samantha was ejected after trying to pass herself off as the English member whose card she had swiped. Destination on Location, by contrast, will take its guests on to the roof of the club for champagne. The tour bus passes the Jimmy Choo store where Carrie loves to shop; the upmarket version will treat its visitors to a cocktail party in the store itself.
For those more interested in the sex than the city, the bus stops at the Pleasure Chest, the sex shop where Charlotte fell in love with her Rabbit (it’s pink, large and costs $92). In the high-end equivalent, aspiring Samanthas can spend time in Babeland, a shop Konstantinakos described as ‘admirably discreet where the paraphernalia is displayed as though it were jewellery”. They will be offered workshops entitled How to Please Your Man.
Told that they could have swapped their $40 tour for something that costs an additional $23 960, the reaction of the women on the bus was pretty universal. Alice, a BBC employee from London, put it elegantly: ‘Something about it reeks of desperation.” —