Pathik Patel - Founder, Fit & Flex

Pathik Patel

Founder, Fit & Flex

More about Pathik Patel

Am an entrepreneur, passionate runner and sports enthusiasts.

Founder of Fit & Flex, young age brand into breakfast cereals and snacking products

Feels really sad to see this, but wasn’t left with a choice either!

It has been 50 days of zero D2C business and all we get to hear is *“We won’t do anything”*

We recently aired on Shark Tank S3- on the 15th of March which was a dream come true, but what followed has turned into a nightmare. Despite our joy at being featured on national television, our happiness was short-lived.

Sony Entertainment Television has unjustly targeted us for trademark violations without any prior notice. They have striked our social media posts containing clips from the shark tank episode and have gone ahead and *blocked our Ad account, unpublished our Facebook page, disabled the collaboration feature on our brands account as well as on my personal account.*

1. No prior notice / warning was sent to us
2. Ideally we have aired in the episode, which we could use for marketing purposes for 3 months from the said date (as per their guidelines)
3. Our content was pulled down within 25 days, after which we ceased to run all shark tank clips on organic as well as paid posts
4. We have been writing to both Meta and Sony daily since, to help us with a solution, but haven’t received any resolution.
5. We don’t want to use any clips for marketing and just want our original accounts back

All we want is someone from the SONY Team to talk to us and help solve this amicably but sadly not a single party (sony legal or shark tank) chose to reply. Not only me but more 70+ brands are facing these challenges.

While we were shown a bigger picture of getting upto 5X & 7X of growth, the Shark Tank experience has infact got us huge loss in business and a downfall of almost 10-12X. 

As the founder of Fit and Flex, I've poured my heart and soul into building our brand from the ground up, and this is extremely disheartening to see that massive media houses are harassing startup brands. 

*Fellow startup founders, please share your thoughts on this, what do you feel?*
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