The cream of the croc

On a recent stroll around the Duolun Lu area in Shanghai’s north, we stumbled across a clothing store that aroused our interest, not only for its collection of black leather slip-on shoes with a little metal badge on the side (never seen those in Shanghai …), but for its name and logo.

Six months ago, Shanghaiist brought you the exciting courtroom saga between French company Lacoste and Singapore company Crocodile, over who had the right to use a crocodile symbol as a logo.

What we want to know is, where were the folks from Clio Coddle (pictured) during that court case? Not only does their logo ring a fairly loud bell, but the name is eerily close to the word "Crocodile". Kind of in the same way that our word “alligator” is appropriated from el lagarto, Spanish for “the lizard”. Kind of.

Maybe the Clio Coddle team was involved but escaped on a technicality: namely that their logo, on closer inspection, looks nothing like a crocodile. As this blogger friend of Mao -- who also found himself intrigued by the Clio Coddle store -- so aptly puts it:

[It’s] actually some sort of strange, Paleolithic proto-crocodile with stubby "fins" and a very weird-looking mouth.

Indeed.

To tell you the truth, Shanghaiist didn’t bother going inside the store (we don’t really like shopping …), so we're unsure if it sells the aforementioned leather shoe favoured by 99 percent of this country’s male population. But in bypassing the place we seem to have missed another little nugget of Clio-Coddle-inspired interest:

The Clio Coddle menswear store in Shanghai has the most surreal sign in English I've ever encountered," writes Denis Martin, of Woolloomooloo. "It reads: 'Eternal gram putting to the trouble of gram and reaching uniqlle grade'.

Shouldn’t be too many trademark issues with that particular statement. It's unique. Uniqlle, even.