The antitrust complaint filed against Deckers Outdoor Corp. raises a question that brand owners engaged in aggressive trade dress programs should take seriously: at what point does a litigation strategy cross from legitimate enforcement into anticompetitive conduct?
On February 20, 2026, Last Brand Inc. — the company behind the retailer Quince — filed an antitrust complaint against Deckers in the Northern District of California, alleging that Deckers uses unregistered product-design trade dress claims as an exclusionary weapon. The filing came as the parties were already headed toward a June trial in separate litigation in which Deckers had sued Quince for trade dress and design patent infringement over several Ugg products, including the Classic Ultra Mini boot and Tasman slipper.
The Antitrust Theory
Quince's complaint is structured around a straightforward but significant argument: Deckers does not file trade dress lawsuits to vindicate protectable rights. It files them to impose litigation costs on competitors, disrupt their sales cycles, and force product withdrawals — regardless of whether the claimed trade dress is legally enforceable.
The complaint documents a pattern: preformatted complaints with verbatim language, identical feature lists, and boilerplate narratives recycled across at least 267 separate pleadings. The Oprah's Favorite Things paragraph, according to the complaint, has appeared without material variation in filings made years apart against different defendants asserting different product designs.
The antitrust theory draws force from a structural feature of unregistered trade dress law. Because common law trade dress rights require no registration, defendants cannot challenge protectability at the USPTO before litigation begins. Instead, they must bear the cost of discovery before courts scrutinize whether the claimed features actually function as source identifiers. Quince contends that Deckers exploits this dynamic deliberately — filing during peak sales seasons, then settling or dismissing after the competitive damage is done.
The complaint also documents a deliberate strategic pivot. From 2010 through 2013, Deckers filed over 20 Bailey Button enforcement actions asserting exclusively design patent claims — and zero trade dress claims. That changed abruptly when a court denied Deckers' motion to dismiss a patent invalidity counterclaim in December 2013. Sixteen days later, Deckers filed its first Bailey Button trade dress complaint. Within weeks, it had filed ten more using identical language. The timing, Quince argues, was not coincidental: trade dress required no registration and shifted the burden to defendants to disprove protectability through expensive discovery, while design patents required validity proof Deckers was no longer confident it could sustain.
Deckers' own in-house counsel supplied what may be the complaint's most damaging allegation. In sworn testimony, Lisa Bereda — Deckers' senior IP enforcement counsel — stated that Deckers chose to assert trade dress over design patents because trade dress "offered a broader scope of protection" and could "capture more" competing products. Bereda also testified that when deciding whether to assert unregistered product-design trade dress, Deckers evaluates its own sales, marketing, PR, and celebrity usage — and does not evaluate what other products are in the marketplace. That testimony, the complaint argues, confirms that Deckers' enforcement program is designed to claim market territory, not to protect legitimate source-identifying rights.
Evidentiary Footing
The complaint does not rely solely on litigation volume. It points to a concrete merits outcome: in the underlying Deckers v. Quince litigation, a court found on partial summary judgment that the Classic Ultra Mini and Tasman trade dresses were generic and unprotectable. That ruling, Quince argues, is the first to evaluate Deckers' product-design claims after full discovery — and the result undermines the premise of Deckers' broader enforcement program.
Quince also notes that the USPTO rejected registration of the Classic Ugg boot design twice, in 2015 and 2018, on grounds that the claimed features were too common in the marketplace to serve as source identifiers, and that Deckers' advertising promoted the UGG brand generally rather than the specific design claimed. Deckers continued to assert those features in litigation notwithstanding.
Perhaps most telling is what happened after the October 2025 summary judgment ruling. Rather than narrow its claims or revisit its enforcement approach, Deckers filed at least 34 new actions asserting the identical five-feature Tasman definition the court had just declared generic and unprotectable. The complaint also documents a pattern of strategic dismissal: when defendants cited the Quince ruling and challenged protectability, Deckers dismissed them — preserving the template for use against defendants who default or settle without a merits ruling.
Implications for Brand Owners
The case does not suggest that aggressive trade dress enforcement is inherently problematic. Brands with protectable trade dress have both the right and, in many cases, the strategic obligation to enforce it. What the Quince complaint illustrates is the risk profile associated with enforcement programs that prioritize volume and procedural pressure over substantive protectability.
Several considerations are worth noting for in-house teams managing trade dress portfolios. First, the absence of a registration is a structural vulnerability — not just on the merits, but in antitrust exposure, because it shifts the cost of protectability determinations to defendants and can be characterized as deliberate. Second, templated enforcement practices create a documentary record that, in the aggregate, may look less like legitimate enforcement and more like a coordinated exclusionary strategy. Third, continuing to assert trade dress in designs where the underlying patents have expired and the products have been discontinued — as Quince alleges with the Bailey Button boot — presents obvious questions about whether the enforcement serves any legitimate competitive purpose. Fourth, and perhaps most directly applicable to future cases, internal sworn testimony about why trade dress was chosen over design patents — and whether competitors' designs were evaluated before filing — can become the centerpiece of an antitrust claim.
Whether Quince's antitrust theory ultimately succeeds is a separate question. The legal standard for sham litigation under Professional Real Estate Investors, Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 508 U.S. 49 (1993), and its progeny is demanding: a plaintiff must show both that the challenged lawsuits were objectively baseless — meaning no reasonable litigant could expect success on the merits — and that the litigation was a means of interfering with a competitor through process rather than outcome. Courts are cautious about using antitrust law to second-guess IP enforcement decisions. But the Quince complaint is carefully constructed to meet that standard, and the post-October 2025 refilings of an already-rejected trade dress definition may prove to be its strongest ground.