Case Overview
A globally renowned women’s apparel brand has established a highly distinctive brand image through its iconic design style. The brand’s signature pink stripe design and V-shaped motif are core visual symbols. A pink color palette serves as the brand’s primary hue, creating a visual identity that is reinforced by the brand’s pink stripe design. Their V-shaped motif is derived from the brand’s initials. When combined, their V-shaped motif on the left chest pocket and black trim around the neckline, cuffs, and the black piping on the openings of their bags create a clear distinction between their products and similar items on the market. This brand has long used these two motifs on the brand’s best-selling sleepwear and lingerie products, establishing a stable association between these design elements and the brand.
However, since the pink stripe design and V-shaped motif were not registered as trademarks in mainland China, numerous market operators unlawfully produced and sold identical infringing products, severely damaging the brand’s legitimate rights and interests. Conventional trademark enforcement channels were inapplicable, leaving the brand’s enforcement efforts in an exceptionally difficult situation.
The company retained the GEN Law team to represent them in filing a lawsuit against a source factory for counterfeiting and selling infringing products, arguing that the designs in question constituted “packaging and decoration of a certain influence” under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. Partners Steve Zhao and Pei Lyu led the case with assistance from attorneys Jiaxin Zhang and Chengyu Deng. Both the first-instance and appellate courts fully upheld the firm’s claims, ruling that the design in question constituted a legally protected garment design and decoration. The court awarded a total of over five million yuan in damages for trademark infringement and unfair competition.
Challenges of the Case and GEN Law’s Case Insights
Challenge 1: Few precedents exist for classifying clothing designs as packaging and decoration, and this type of intellectual property is relatively uncommon.
In judicial practice, there are very few cases where clothing designs have been protected under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. There is a lack of clear judicial precedents for directly classifying combinations of clothing patterns, colors, and styles as “packaging and decoration with a certain degree of influence,” making it extremely difficult to provide evidence and arguments regarding the nature of these rights and the necessity of protection.
Our Strategy: Focus on the core logic of “distinctive design + long-term use + distinctive function” to establish a comprehensive legal foundation.
We assisted the client’s U.S. headquarters and China division in systematically collecting evidence of the continuous use of the design in question since 1996, establishing a complete timeline to prove the design’s distinctiveness and prior use.
We comprehensively organized materials related to product sales, marketing promotions, and consumer perception to demonstrate that both designs had acquired the ability to identify the source of the goods and constituted distinctive packaging and decoration uniquely associated with the brand.
Challenge 2: Stringent Requirements for Demonstrating Influence and Dispersed Evidence Since the design in question is an unregistered trademark, it must be proven to have “gained a certain degree of influence” in order to qualify for protection. However, evidence of relevant use and promotion is scattered across multiple domestic and international channels, making it difficult to consolidate into a persuasive body of evidence.
Our Strategy: Systematically compile evidence of market influence to reinforce the connection between market recognition and the brand.
By coordinating evidence across all dimensions—including product sales data, advertising campaigns, media coverage, and market reputation—we clearly demonstrated that, through long-term use and promotion, the design in question has established widespread recognition and stable market perception within the lingerie and loungewear sectors.
Challenge 3: Infringement spans multiple platforms, transaction data is fragmented, and it is difficult to prove profits derived from infringement.
The infringing party infringed through e-commerce platforms such as 1688 and Pinduoduo, as well as payment channels like Alipay and Tenpay. The volume of transaction records was massive, and they were scattered and disorganized, making it extremely difficult to sort through them. As a result, it is impossible to accurately determine the volume of infringing sales and the resulting profits, which directly limits the damages awarded.
Our Strategy: Utilize judicial investigation and evidence collection to meticulously secure evidence of infringing profits and reconstruct the sales scale of the source factory.
We applied to the court to obtain the infringer’s authentic backend transaction data from various platforms, breaking through the barriers of data concealment. We then screened and cross-verifified tens of thousands of transaction records one by one to pinpoint core infringing sales volumes, fully linking the infringing entities, infringing acts, and illicit gains, thereby providing a solid basis for high-value awards for the damages. Simultaneously, by tracing sales records to demonstrate that the defendant’s source factory continuously supplied multiple e-commerce sellers, we argued that the source factory’s infringement has had a significant impact.
Judgment and Highlights
Judgment: The court ordered the infringing party to immediately cease using the product packaging in question—which had gained a certain degree of recognition—and to stop other acts of infringement. The court awarded a total of over five million yuan in damages for trademark infringement and unfair competition.
Case Highlights:
• Precision Strike Against the Source of Infringement: This case targeted the source of the infringement supply chain. The defendant was a manufacturing plant that supplied goods in bulk to multiple e-commerce sellers through wholesale platforms such as 1688. By identifying and targeting the source factory, the court effectively severed the infringement supply chain, maximizing the efficiency of rights protection and providing an effective pathway for brands to address large-scale, chain-based infringement.
• Breakthrough in Judicial Ruling: The court explicitly ruled that the pink stripe design and the V-shaped pocket combination on the pajamas in question constitute packaging and decoration with a certain degree of influence, as protected under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, marking a significant breakthrough in the protection of rights related to apparel design.
• Innovative Approach to Rights Protection: Since the design elements in question were not registered as trademarks in the relevant categories, direct protection under trademark law was difficult to achieve. By successfully relying on the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, this case has established an effective fallback protection mechanism for commercial symbols and visual elements that fall outside the scope of trademark protection.
• Exemplary Value for the Industry: Visual elements and style combinations in the field of apparel design have long faced challenges in terms of protection and legal recognition. This case is a rare and exemplary precedent in judicial practice that directly recognizes the overall design of an apparel item as protected trade dress, providing an important reference for the fashion industry in defending original designs.
• Strengthening Regulation of Malicious Infringement: The court comprehensively considered the infringer’s subjective malice in capitalizing on the brand’s reputation and intentionally causing confusion, imposing strict regulations on counterfeiting and free-riding behaviors, thereby effectively safeguarding market competition order and the legitimate rights and interests of brand owners.
• Landmark Significance in Legal Application: This case clearly establishes judicial principles, holding that the overall visual design of clothing—when used over a long period and capable of identifying the source—can be recognized as trade dress with a certain degree of influence. This breaks through the traditional understanding that protection is limited to outer packaging and expands the scope of protection for commercial identifiers.
The content of this article represents the author’s personal views only and should not be construed as formal legal advice or recommendations issued by GEN Law
