Velcro wants you to stop using the term 'Velcro' incorrectly - a catchy music video explains why

The legal team at Velcro is, according to a new tongue-in-cheek video, fed up with people misusing the brand's name to refer to shoes and wallets that use generic fastening technology.

They are not "velcro shoes" or "velcro wallets," the company insists, but shoes and wallets with hook-and-loop fasteners.

To drive the point home, the company today released a music video of (apparent) Velcro employees taking turns, in rhapsodic verse, decrying the ways people incorrectly use the brand in everyday life.

"We're a company that's so successful, that everywhere you go you see this hairy, scratchy fastener and you say, 'Hey! That's velcro!" a male "employee" in a suit begins, before dishing the next verse to a businesswoman. "But even though we invented this stuff, our patent lapsed forty years ago. Now no matter who else makes it, you still want to call it 'velcro.'"

The gripe seems mostly like a joke, but as the video's description contends, when people use the generic name "velcro" to refer to a non-branded version of the adhesive technology, "you diminish the importance of our brand."

Velcro would prefer people recognize that it has invented and secured patents on dozens of products, not just the stuff that replaces laces. 

The distinction is akin to the one Lego makes when talking about its bricks, which most of the Lego-brick-using public simply refers to as "Legos."