Australian Company Loses Ugg Trademark Battle

On the other hand, he acknowledged, Deckers spent years building up Uggs into a sophisticated lifestyle brand — a far cry from the situation in Australia, where they are relegated to souvenir shop windows, and people use them for grocery store runs and wear them around the house.

“The internet has given us access to a global market. We can distribute products all around the world. But the legal systems aren’t global. They’re within countries,” Dr. Wilkie said.

At its peak, Australian Leather made about 50,000 to 60,000 pairs of boots a year and had a few dozen staff members. Last year, Deckers earned $2 billion in revenue, with three-quarters of that coming from the Ugg brand, according to its 2020 annual report.

The stakes for both companies were high. Before the verdict, Nicole Murdoch, an intellectual property lawyer at Eaglegate Lawyers in Brisbane, Australia, said a legal success for Mr. Oygur would have a “catastrophic effect for Deckers,” costing the company the trademark on which it had built its brand.

Mr. Oygur said before the verdict, “All the ugg boot makers in Australia will turn to imports because of the prices, and Australia will lose what’s been Australian since the 1930s.”

Personally, he had put everything on the line: the business he had run for nearly 40 years and a house he had mortgaged to pay his legal fees. He said he had spent over a million dollars on the case, lost the majority of his staff and seen the legal challenge scare off many of his customers.

“God help me, I’m not going to back down,” he said. “They gave me no choice. Absolutely no choice.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/business/uggs-lawsuit-australia.html