MZ Wallace fails to prove trade dress existence in handbag case
American fashion company MZ Wallace has lost a trade dress case against Oliver Thomas, a year-old handbag brand.
The decision was handed down by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on December 20.
MZ Wallace began the proceedings in May 2018, claiming that Oliver Thomas’s quilted handbags infringed its trade dress.
In the case, MZ Wallace claimed that it had trade dress rights on the quilted pattern on its handbags, including the Metro Tote, its most successful product.
According to the ruling, “the quilting used on MZ Wallace bags bearing the trade dress is made of squares with edges that measure 2.5 centimetres on a flat piece of nylon”.
Oliver Thomas, established in 2017, obtained a number of samples of MZ Wallace products and produced its own range of bags with a number of similar features.
MZ Wallace sent a cease and desist letter in February 2018 accusing Oliver Thomas of copying “the Metro Tote’s shape, straps, and pocketing”. According to the ruling, Lucy Wallace Eustice, a co-founder of MZ Wallace, also approached employees of Oliver Thomas at a trade show accusing the company of producing “knock-offs” of MZ Wallace’s products.
The court found that, throughout the proceedings, MZ Wallace failed to demonstrate sufficient evidence of trade dress. According to the decision, “Oliver Thomas used certain elements of MZ Wallace bags that it believed effectively tapped into consumer desires, and created similar bags in a lower price range”.
The design elements in question, however, “were common features of handbag design” and not exclusive to MZ Wallace’s products, the court said.
In particular, the court found no evidence of a “secondary meaning” or customer confusion in the case. “MZ Wallace has not established that consumers associate the trade dress with a single source, much less with MZ Wallace,” the ruling said.
David Bernstein of Debevoise & Plimpton represented Oliver Thomas. In a press release, Bernstein said that “no company has the right to monopolise commonly used, functional features like diamond quilted patterns on handbags, which have been used by fashion companies on handbags for decades”.
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