On August 28, 2026, Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen dismissed the antitrust case that Quince brought against Deckers Outdoor Corporation, the owner of UGG. The headline reads like a win for the big brand. The reasoning does not, and the difference is worth understanding, because the question underneath this case is one that reaches well past two footwear companies: at what point does enforcing your intellectual property stop being protection and start being an antitrust problem?
How this started, and why it matters that Deckers lost the first round
Deckers sued first. In 2023 it brought design patent and trade dress claims against Last Brand, Inc., the company that operates Quince, over shearling boots it said copied the look of UGG. That case, Deckers Outdoor Corp. v. Last Brand, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-04850 (N.D. Cal.), did not go the way Deckers wanted.
On October 2, 2025, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted Quince partial summary judgment. She held that the claimed trade dress in the Classic Ultra Mini boot and the Tasman clog slipper was generic — "so common in the industry that [it] cannot be said to identify a particular source." The record showed fourteen or more competitors selling comparable ankle-height shearling boots and nine or more selling comparable clogs. The shapes were category norms, not brand signals. Deckers’ own motion failed, partly because it never addressed aesthetic functionality, and Quince’s expert evidence that the features affect cost or quality created a fact question for a jury. Deckers held on to its design patent, D927,161: the court found Quince’s invalidity arguments too thin to meet the clear-and-convincing standard.
That ruling is the hinge. It is one of the clearest recent statements of something independent designers learn the hard way — that the silhouette of a garment is usually not yours. Fashion has almost no copyright in the cut of a thing, and trade dress only attaches where a design actually functions as a source identifier. A shape everyone in the category uses is, by definition, not doing that job.
What Quince actually alleged
Four and a half months later, on February 20, 2026, Quince turned around and sued Deckers under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The complaint in Last Brand, Inc. v. Deckers Outdoor Corp., No. 5:26-cv-01540-SVK (N.D. Cal.), is not a claim that Deckers sued Quince unfairly. It is a claim that Deckers runs an enforcement operation designed to keep prices high by making competition too expensive to attempt.
The numbers in the complaint are the argument. Quince defines the relevant market as sheepskin and shearling-lined casual footwear — boots, slippers, slides, sandals — sold in the United States, and puts Deckers above fifty percent of it, on UGG net sales of roughly $2.53 billion in fiscal 2025. It alleges Deckers has filed hundreds of template complaints asserting unregistered product-design trade dress, with 267 or more pleadings recycling identical "Oprah’s Favorite Things" language since 2012. And it alleges that after the October 2025 ruling held the Tasman trade dress generic, Deckers filed at least thirty-four new actions asserting the same definition a federal court had just rejected. UGG boots retail at roughly $100 to $200; the competitors being sued sell at about half that.
The relief sought tells you what Quince is really after: treble damages, yes, but also an injunction barring Deckers from filing on the specified trade dresses at all, from asserting product designs as inherently distinctive, and a requirement that it plead in detail before suing anyone.
Why the case was dismissed
Litigation is petitioning, and petitioning is protected. Under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, going to court is First Amendment activity and generally cannot itself be an antitrust violation. There is a sham exception, and this is where the case turned.
The exception comes in two flavors, and they are not the same test. For a single lawsuit, Professional Real Estate Investors v. Columbia Pictures requires that the suit be objectively baseless — no reasonable litigant could expect to win — and then that it conceal an attempt to injure a competitor through the process itself. That is a hard standard, deliberately. But for a series of lawsuits, the Ninth Circuit asks something different: whether the suits were brought pursuant to a policy of starting legal proceedings without regard to the merits. Under that test, individual suits can even succeed and the pattern still be a sham.
Quince pleaded the second theory, which is the right one for a campaign. The problem was that it never identified the campaign with enough precision. As Judge van Keulen put it, "an overarching problem is that the complaint fails to explain which of the many lawsuits and pleadings identified in the complaint are the 'series of lawsuits' upon which Quince bases its" claim. Hundreds of filings were gestured at. The specific series was never drawn.
That is a pleading defect, not a holding that enforcement campaigns are lawful. The court did not say Deckers’ conduct was protected; it said Quince had not yet described what it was suing about. Law360 framed the ruling as a win "for now," and defects of this kind are ordinarily curable by amendment. Anyone relying on this should check the docket rather than assume the case is finished.
What this means if you are the small brand
Most designers reading this will never file an antitrust claim. The relevance is on the receiving end, when a template cease-and-desist arrives asserting trade dress in a shape you are fairly sure belongs to the category.
Three things follow from these two rulings. First, an assertion of unregistered product-design trade dress is a claim that has to be proven, not a fact. Deckers lost on genericness because the evidence showed a crowded field, and that evidence is often gatherable — competitor listings, catalogs, dates. Second, a court holding a specific trade dress generic does not automatically stop it being asserted elsewhere; the complaint alleges thirty-four new filings after the ruling. Knowing a favorable decision exists, and citing it early, is on you. Third, the cost asymmetry is the actual weapon in these disputes, which is why the response to a template letter is usually not capitulation and not litigation but a specific, documented reply that makes the sender price the case honestly.
And the deeper point is the one the October ruling made plainly. If your protection strategy depends on owning a silhouette, you have very little. What is defensible is what you can evidence: registered marks, documented provenance, a design record with dates, and the things that genuinely distinguish your work rather than the ones the whole category shares.
This is editorial analysis, not legal advice. If you have received an enforcement letter, talk to a lawyer about your specific facts.