If you are a bubble tea fan you would be in the loop of the drama between Loob Holdings vs La Kaffa International. Before we go into the real purpose of this post, we would like to summarise the whole incident so that even if you were not following the drama, you would still be up-to-date with everything.
The whole drama started when La Kaffa International, the franchisor for Chatime, wanting to reclaim back the franchise license from Loob Holdings for all the Chatime outlets here in Malaysia. The reason provided for this move is that Loob Holdings were not using the proper ingredients for their drinks and thus have violated franchise agreements. Other sources said that La Kaffa is unhappy with Loob because of the difference in business direction. Loob Holdings on the other hand claims that this is just another tactic to takeover from them once they have already build the Chatime brand over the years to where it is today.
Bryan Loo, the owner of Loob Holdings decided to give up the Chatime franchise and come up with his own brand, name Tealive. He managed to convince 161 Chatime outlets (out of 250 outlets) to make the switch to his new brand, come up with a totally new brand image and new brand name, and he did all this in less than 50 days. Amazing feat.
So that now you’ve caught up with all the happenings, we can now get into the real deal of this article.
While catching with all this drama, we stumbled on this picture:
“NEVER FEAR THE STRONG”
Looks and sounds familiar right?
If you know of the local brand Mutha Puaka, this tagline would be very, very familiar to you. As you can see from the picture above which was taken from Mutha Puaka’s Instagram account, which shows the tagline first being shared to the public 134 weeks ago, which would put it sometime during late July 2014.
Well some of you are probably thinking “Probably it was just a coincidence” right? Read this few snippets taken from interviews Bryan Loo made with a few media outlets:
How is it going to be different from Chatime?
There are a few ways. Our mission is totally different – we want to be the brand that protects the weak and isn’t afraid of the strong; but also the brand that embraces changes.
source: Malaysia Tatler
So I did a bit more digging and saw another article:
With so many tea base drinks already in the market, how will Loob Holding differentiate Tealive from Chatime? “Our mission is totally different – we want to be the brand that protects the weak and isn’t afraid of the strong; but also the brand that embraces changes.”
source: Hype.my
We also took the liberty to do a google search of the phrase and this is what the results were:
As you can see from the image above, the first image to appear is the Mutha Puaka poster and the Mutha Puaka Facebook Page is the 4th result from the search, and nothing else to show that this the quote is common. In fact we scrolled the Google search a few more pages down and found nothing else that has that exact “Never Fear The Strong” phrase, except for the Mutha Puaka poster.
Of course Google searches may vary depending on the user’s web browsing habits, so we ran the search from 4 different computers and the results were the same.
But then again, all this may have just been a huge coincidence, and we do not have a definitive answer on this issue, so we have reached out to somebody from Mutha Puaka to comment on this and they have yet to come back with a reply on the matter.
In the meantime, stay tuned to our social media accounts as we will be updating more once we have anything.
