Deckers Just Learned the Hard Way That a Design Patent Has to Actually Be a Design
A federal jury in California handed down one of the more interesting verdicts I've seen this year in the Deckers Outdoor Corp. v. Quince case. The jury found that Quince's Australian Shearling Mini Boot infringed Deckers' design patent covering the Ugg Ultra Mini Boot. And then, in the same verdict, the jury found that the patent was invalid. Quince walked away owing nothing, despite the jury essentially agreeing that Quince copied the look of the Ugg boot.
That outcome confuses people who haven't spent time around design patents. It shouldn't. It's actually a clean illustration of a rule that a lot of brand owners forget when they're racing to court over what the fashion press calls "dupe culture"*: a design patent only protects ornamental design. It does not protect function. And if your own patent drawings show structural, functional elements rather than a genuinely distinctive ornamental design, you can win the copying argument and still lose the case.
What actually happened
Deckers sued Quince claiming the Australian Shearling Mini Boot copied the patented design of the Ugg Ultra Mini Boot. After a four-day trial in the Northern District of California, the jury split its verdict: infringement, yes; valid patent, no. According to at least one juror's account after the trial, the patent fell apart for two reasons. First, the design drawings in Deckers' own patent lacked the kind of detail that distinguishes a protectable ornamental design from a generic shape. Second, and more fundamentally, the features the patent actually claimed, the seams, the construction lines, the overall silhouette, were functional elements of how the boot is built, not ornamental choices about how it looks.
That's a fatal combination for a design patent. The whole premise of design patent protection is that it covers the appearance of an article, not the way the article works. When the patent owner's own drawings end up reading more like an engineering diagram than an aesthetic statement, a defendant has a real shot at invalidating the patent regardless of how similar the accused product looks.
Why this matters beyond Ugg boots
This case landed in the middle of a much bigger fight that's been playing out across the fashion and consumer goods industry for the last couple of years: the rise of "dupe" retailers like Quince, Amazon Basics-style private labels, and direct-to-consumer brands that build entire business models around offering products that look like the premium version at a fraction of the price. Established brands have responded with an aggressive wave of design patent litigation, treating the design patent as a blunt instrument to shut down anyone selling something that resembles their product. How to address Dupe Culture was a big part of INTA’s Annual Meeting this year in London.
The Deckers verdict is a reminder that design patents are not actually that blunt an instrument, and brand owners who treat them that way are setting themselves up for exactly this kind of result. Filing the lawsuit is the easy part. Surviving a validity challenge is where the real fight happens, and that fight turns entirely on what the patent drawings actually show, not on how similar the products look on a shelf or in a TikTok comparison video.
If you're a brand owner thinking about a design patent, ornamentality has to be designed in from the start, not argued in after the fact. That means working with patent counsel who understands the difference between a feature that makes a product look distinctive and a feature that makes it function correctly, and making sure the application's drawings emphasize the former and stay quiet about the latter. A design patent application drafted to look impressive to a trademark-minded marketing team is not the same thing as one drafted to survive a validity fight in front of a jury that's been told, correctly, that function doesn't count.
The other side of this coin
If you're the one accused of copying, and you've been served with a design patent infringement claim over a product that genuinely does resemble a competitor's design, this case is your roadmap. Don't spend all your defense budget arguing that the products look different enough to avoid infringement. That fight is often a loser on the facts, especially in a "dupe" case where similarity is the whole point of the business model. Spend it instead on the patent itself. Pull the file history. Look hard at what the drawings actually claim. Ask whether the features that make the products look alike are ornamental choices or load-bearing, functional necessities of how the product has to be built to work.
Deckers lost not because Quince proved its boot looked different. Deckers lost because its own patent couldn't survive the scrutiny of what it was actually protecting. That's a defense that exists in a meaningful share of design patent cases, and it's one that gets overlooked by defendants who are too busy arguing about similarity to look at validity.
There's also a broader lesson here about how design patent litigation gets used as leverage. A design patent gives a brand owner a fast, intimidating-looking lawsuit to file, often paired with a request for an injunction that can shut down a competitor's product line before trial. That leverage is real, and it works on a lot of defendants who settle rather than fight. But leverage built on a patent that was never going to survive a validity challenge is leverage that evaporates the moment a defendant calls the bluff and goes to trial instead of folding.
My name is Jonathan Phillips. I am an attorney where I handle patent and trademark disputes for businesses on both sides: brand owners protecting genuine designs and sellers fighting overreaching infringement suits. If you're facing either situation, I'd be glad to talk it through. Contact me HERE.