In 1941, a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral went hunting in the Jura mountains and came home annoyed. Burdock burrs had stuck to his trousers and to his dog, and they were tedious to pull off. Most people would have picked them off and forgotten about it. De Mestral put one under a microscope.
What he saw was a mechanism: thousands of tiny hooks on the burr, grabbing onto anything with a loop — fabric, fur, anything. He spent the next decade trying to replicate it in textile form, eventually working with a weaver in Lyon to produce two strips of fabric: one covered in stiff hooks, one in soft loops. Pressed together, they held. Pulled apart, they released — with that sound everyone now knows.
He patented the invention in 1955. For the name, he did what Rolex's Hans Wilsdorf and a century of brand-builders have done: he constructed a word. He took the French velours (velvet) and crochet (hook) and fused them into VELCRO. A made-up word, distinctive, ownable, registrable. Textbook trademark.
The Patent Expired. The Name Didn't.
De Mestral's patent expired in 1978, and that's where the story becomes a trademark story. The moment the patent died, anyone could legally manufacture hook and loop fasteners — and many did, at scale, often cheaper. The only thing competitors could not legally take was the name VELCRO. The patent had protected the invention for twenty years; the trademark, properly defended, could protect the brand forever.
But there was a problem, and the company knew it. The public had spent decades calling the product itself 'velcro.' Velcro shoes. A velcro wallet. Velcro straps on a blood pressure cuff — made by someone else entirely. The word was drifting from brand name to product category, the same drift that had already killed aspirin, escalator, cellophane, thermos, and trampoline as trademarks in the United States.
Genericide: when a trademark becomes the generic name for the product category itself, the law revokes it — courts cancel the registration and the word belongs to everyone. ASPIRIN (Bayer), ESCALATOR (Otis), and THERMOS lost protection exactly this way. The better a product dominates its category, the more dangerous its own success becomes for the name.
The Music Video
Trademark owners fighting genericide usually do it quietly: stern letters to journalists, style guides for retailers, corrections in dictionaries. The Velcro Companies decided in 2017 to do it loudly. The company released a professionally produced music video titled 'Don't Say Velcro' — featuring its actual in-house lawyers, on camera, singing.
The lyrics were genuine trademark law set to music: the product is called hook and loop; VELCRO is a brand; when you call every scratchy fastener 'velcro,' you're hurting the trademark — 'we're begging you.' The video leaned into its own absurdity, the lawyers visibly aware of how ridiculous the exercise was, which is precisely why it worked. It spread globally, picked up press coverage that no cease-and-desist campaign would ever earn, and was followed by a sequel responding to the public's mockery: 'Thank You For Your Feedback.'
Underneath the comedy was a legal document with a deadly serious function. If VELCRO's registrations are ever challenged as generic, the company can point to a sustained, public, well-documented education campaign — evidence that it actively policed the line between brand and product category. Courts weigh exactly this kind of effort when deciding whether a mark has died.
What the Right Answer Sounds Like
The company's official vocabulary goes like this: it's a VELCRO® Brand hook and loop fastener. The word VELCRO functions only as an adjective attached to 'Brand' — never a noun, never a verb. You don't 'velcro' your shoes any more than you 'xerox' a document or 'rollerblade' to work, at least not if the trademark departments of those companies have anything to say about it.
It's a strange afterlife for George de Mestral's burrs. The invention has flown on spacecraft — NASA's use of hook and loop fasteners in zero gravity did more for the product's fame than any campaign — and it holds together shoes, blood pressure cuffs, cable bundles, and car interiors on every continent. The patent has been public property for almost fifty years. The only thing left to own is the word, and the company that owns it once put its lawyers in a recording studio to keep it.