Copy-cake designer complaint

A SCOTTISH cake designer’s wedding cake advertisements are to be probed by the Advertising Standards Authority – after a prospective customer noticed the firm was marketing its products using photographs taken from an American company’s website.

The ASA confirmed it had received a complaint about the website belonging to Edinburgh-based Licks Cake Design.

Groom-to-be James Dean had been trawling the internet for a distinctive Tiffany blue cake to match his fiancee’s preferred colour scheme. Initially, he only managed to find cakes he liked on sites belonging to American and Australian companies – particularly New Jersey-based Pinkcakebox.com. Shortly afterwards, he was delighted to come across similar designs on Licks’s site. But he quickly noticed that the pictures were identical to ones he had seen earlier.

“They had just been flipped round to try to make them look slightly different, but on one of them, you could still see the other company’s name in mirror writing on the photograph,” said Dean, from Edinburgh. “You just want everything on your wedding day to be perfect.”

A spokesman for the ASA said: “We have received one complaint about marketing claims on Licks Cake Design’s website. We have only just received the complaint, so the next step is to assess whether there appear to be grounds for an investigation.”

Under ASA rules, any marketing communications used by a company must not “materially mislead or be likely to do so”.

A spokesman for Licks said: “We use inspiration from other cake designers for our work. I am going to look into this particular issue.”