Greenhouse owner trademarks 'flower truck'

In 2008, local greenhouse owner Angie Olsen purchased a rusted, 1950s-era Ford truck at an antique tractor show.

She set it up outside her business, Angie’s Greenhouse in Columbia Falls, and planted flowers throughout the truck and surrounding it. A friend helped her paint the business name, phone number and some flowers on the side.

It became a logo for her greenhouse — in her branding, but also a physical sculpture unique to her business. She even sold a few merchandise items, T-shirts and sweatshirts with the image of the truck on them.

People complimented her on the creative reappropriation of an old truck, and many took photos. Within a few years of buying the truck, it began making appearances on T-shirts, birthday cards and puzzles in mainstream stores.

She had never expected it to become so popular, and while seeing her flower-truck creation being recognized and picked up by so many different companies should have given her a sense of pride in her artistic expression, there was one problem. No one had ever asked her permission to use the image of her truck.

“I always thought it was neat but I didn’t think it was cool enough that people would want to take photos to sell,” Olsen said.

Olsen didn’t even know that there were images of her truck out there being used for commercial purposes until a tourist recognized the truck from a puzzle he had purchased at Barnes and Noble.

Olsen was in a state of disbelief. At first she assumed it must have been a different truck that he had been talking about — she hadn’t been the first person to take an old vehicle and fill it with flowers — but sure enough when he pulled it up on Amazon for her, there it was. It was the image of her truck complete with “Angie’s Greenhouse” and her business phone number on the side, broken down into 500 “large and easy to handle” puzzle pieces.

When she later saw a T-shirt with an image of her truck for sale at T.J. Maxx, it became apparent that she needed to protect the image of her truck in some way.

“Even if people would have just come in and asked it would have been different,” she said, “but they never did.”

She started going through the process of registering her truck with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. On the first try, her application was turned down. On the second try she succeeded, and as of last year, her truck is now a registered sculpture with the trademark office and is protected by multiple copyrights.

Registering the flower truck will make it very challenging for anyone else to use the image in the future, Olsen said, but for the products that are already out there it does little to keep them from being sold.

A quick search on Amazon for “flower truck puzzle” will still bring up multiple products with images of Olsen’s truck.

After talking it through with one puzzle company, they agreed to send Olsen 150 puzzles in exchange for her permission to keep making them, but an agreement has yet to be made with several of the other companies.

Olsen was frustrated to find that one company had even altered the text on the side of the truck to say “Laura’s Greenhouse.”

The company that made the first puzzle Olsen discovered, after a tourist had shown it to her, has since quit making them, though the puzzle itself is still for sale online.

Angie Olsen first opened her greenhouse more than 20 years ago as a wholesale operation — selling to local stores, including the old Gary and Leo’s in Columbia Falls.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2007, Olsen closed her wholesale greenhouse in Whitefish and later opened her retail location at 1722 Ninth St. W. Columbia Falls.

She now enjoys finding new and creative ways to display her flowers, though she says she wasn’t always into gardening. In fact in high school, she hated it. It wasn’t until her father forced her into joining Future Farmers of America that she discovered she actually enjoyed it.

She became interested in horticulture and went to school for a couple years before getting married, when she opened her wholesale business. She’s now been married for 24 years and has five children.

Over the years, the truck was far from the only unique flower display that Olsen has created.

Every year since 2012, Olsen has created a new display for the various parade floats, including the Kalispell parades, the Columbia Falls Night of Lights and Heritage Days. She’s used old Volkswagens, tractors and trucks, some of which now act as displays at her greenhouse.

An old, rainbow-colored VW Bug sits at the back of the outdoor greenhouse, sunken in asphalt — her husband’s idea, Olsen said. She added a tire wall behind the Bug, and she plants flowers inside the tires.

Some of the vehicles she found on her property, a third-generation farm that was her family’s original homestead.

Olsen said she enjoys being creative, doing projects like filling a boat with water to create a pond for an aquatic plant display.

“I just like to think outside the box,” Olsen said.

Olsen won multiple trophies for her creative float displays, which she now proudly displays in her store. Next to her trophies, she also has several images of her truck that artists and photographers have given her over the years. One year, the senior center gave her a framed copy of one of the puzzles with her truck on it — not knowing about the controversy. That, too, hangs on the wall of her store.

Reporter Alyssa Gray may be reached at 758-4433 or agray@dailyinterlake.com.