Protect the Look That Sells: Lessons from the Smucker’s v. Trader Joe’s Packaging Fight

The Supreme Court declined to hear Vetements. The FederalCircuit’s doctrine of foreign equivalents stands. Here’s what international brands need to knowbefore filing in the U.S.

In January 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up Vetements Group AG v. Stewart.With that single decision — actually a non-decision — a Swiss luxury label lost its last avenue toregister one of the most recognizable brand names in fashion.

The mark was VETEMENTS. The problem was that the word means “clothing” in French.

For international brands eyeing the U.S. market, the Vetements outcome is a warning that needsto be taken seriously before product launch — not after the office action lands.

What the doctrine of foreign equivalents actually says

The doctrine of foreign equivalents directs U.S. examiners and courts to translate non-English words into English when assessing whether a trademark is generic, descriptive, or confusingly similar to another mark.

The mechanics matter. The doctrine applies when an “appreciable number” of U.S. consumerswould “stop and translate” the foreign word into English. Once that threshold is met, the mark isevaluated based on its English meaning. If the English meaning is generic for the goods (as”vetements” was for clothing), the mark cannot be registered. If it’s descriptive (think a Spanishword that means “soft” applied to bedding), registration requires proof of acquireddistinctiveness.

Why Vetements changed the conversation

The Federal Circuit’s 2025 decision in In re Vetements Group AG applied the doctrine in its most expansive form. The court held that French qualifies as a “common modern language” because it’s the second-most widely taught non-English language in U.S. schools. The TTAB and Federal Circuit had both rejected Vetements’ argument that its consumer base — luxury fashion buyers— wouldn’t actually stop and translate the brand name into “clothing” before buying.

By declining to hear the case, the Supreme Court left that reasoning intact. The practical consequence: if your client’s brand name translates to a generic or descriptive English term, and the source language is one a meaningful number of Americans understand, USPTO registration is likely refused on the merits.

Which languages trigger the doctrine

The Federal Circuit and TTAB have consistently applied the doctrine to Spanish, French,German, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian. These are the languages with the largest U.S. speaker populations, the most academic instruction, or both.

Languages with smaller U.S. footprints get more breathing room — Tagalog, Polish, Vietnamese,Hindi, and many African languages have produced more favorable outcomes — but even there, the analysis is fact-specific. A mark in Vietnamese sold primarily into Vietnamese-American communities will be translated. The same mark sold to a general consumer market may not be.

The strategic problem this creates

Most international brands enter the U.S. market with a name that’s already proven elsewhere.The brand has equity. Inventory has been printed. Marketing campaigns have been built around it. The instinct is to file the U.S. application, see what happens, and deal with refusals if they come.

That sequence is now backwards. With the doctrine of foreign equivalents fully entrenched, thestrategic moves need to happen before product launch:

Pre-clearance translation analysis. Before any U.S. activity, run the brand name through native-speaker translation in every common modern language — not just dictionary checks. A word that doesn’t appear in a dictionary may still translate colloquially into a generic English term.

Goods-and-services targeting. The doctrine bites hardest when the translation is generic for thegoods. A mark meaning “fast” might be descriptive for vehicles but arbitrary for pencils.Strategic class selection can sometimes preserve registration.

Acquired distinctiveness planning. If the mark is descriptive (rather than generic) under the doctrine, registration is possible after five years of substantially exclusive U.S. use plus consumer recognition evidence. That’s a real path — but it requires planning the U.S. activity to generate the evidence base.

Companion design marks. A stylized logo incorporating the foreign word may be registrable even when the word alone is not. Design marks have their own considerations and aren’t a universal solution, but they’re often the right move for brands that need something on the U.S.register quickly.

Sub-brand strategy. For some clients, the cleanest move is to register a U.S.-specific sub-brand or umbrella name that doesn’t carry the doctrine risk, while keeping the original brand for non-U.S. markets. This is a hard conversation to have with clients who have spent years building global brand equity. It’s a much harder conversation to have after a Federal Circuit appeal has already failed.

The case study pattern we keep seeing

A European founder builds a brand in their home market. The name is a real word in their language — sometimes evocative, sometimes lyrical, sometimes simply describing what the product is. The brand grows. Distribution opens in additional EU markets. Eventually, the U.S.becomes a strategic priority. Counsel files a U.S. trademark application based on the home-country registration under §44(e). Eight to twelve months later, the office action arrives citing the doctrine of foreign equivalents. By then the founder has invested in U.S. inventory, marketing, sometimes a U.S. office.

The refusal is appealable. But the appeal is expensive, often unsuccessful, and the underlying strategic problem — that the brand cannot be registered in the U.S. as it stands — remains.

This pattern is preventable. It requires bringing U.S. trademark counsel into the conversation at the brand-naming or U.S.-expansion-planning stage, not at the filing stage.

How Kaleidoscope Law approaches it

For international brands considering U.S. expansion, our standard engagement begins with a doctrine-of-foreign-equivalents pre-clearance analysis as part of the broader trademark search. We assess the mark in its language of origin, evaluate the likely translation outcome, and map out the registration paths that remain viable.

If the mark is registrable as-is, we file. If it isn’t, we develop a strategy that preserves the brand equity you’ve built while creating a U.S. trademark position you can actually own and enforce.

Get in touch.

You filed your trademark application. You waited the better part of a year for an examining attorney to pick it up. And then the office action arrived: a “likelihood of confusion” refusal citing a senior application or registration you’d never heard of, owned by an entity you can’t seem to find online.
You’re not necessarily looking at a legitimate competitor. Post 2025, you may be looking at a record that the USPTO has already started cleaning off the register.

What happened in 2025
In June 2025, the USPTO issued a precedential Final Order for Sanctions against Stelcore Management Services, terminating thousands of trademark filings and barring the operation from future submissions. Two months later, in August 2025, the agency dropped a far larger order against Shenzhen Seller Growth Network Technology Co., terminating more than 52,000 applications and registrations connected to that single foreign filing operation.

Both orders rested on the same pattern. Non-attorneys had been filing U.S. trademark applications using stolen or fabricated U.S.-attorney signatures. Specimens were digitally altered. Owner identities were inconsistent across hundreds of related filings. The USPTO concluded that improper signatures made with intent to circumvent the rules were not correctable — they invalidate the underlying filing.
The agency has signaled this is the start, not the end. Mass-cancellation infrastructure is being built out specifically to handle the next wave.

Why this matters for your application
Examining attorneys are obligated to refuse applications based on prior pending or registered marks that are confusingly similar — even when those prior marks are themselves the product of fraud. Until the USPTO formally terminates a fraudulent record, it sits on the register and blocks legitimate applicants from registering their marks.
The burden of clearing that blocker falls on you and your counsel.

How to spot a fraudulent blocker
Not every unfamiliar prior mark is fraudulent. But certain patterns warrant a closer look:
– A specimen that appears as a stock image elsewhere on the internet, or as the same image across multiple unrelated brand registrations. Reverse-image search is your friend.
– An owner address that resolves to a virtual office, mail-forwarding service, or a residential address with dozens of unrelated business entities registered to it.
– A U.S. attorney of record whose practice has no apparent connection to trademark law, or whose name appears on hundreds of recent filings across unrelated industries.
– A filing history that shows the application was prosecuted with template-style responses, identical specimens across multiple goods, or oddly clustered timing with other suspicious filings.
– A goods-and-services identification that is unusually broad, copied verbatim from another registration, or uses phrasing that doesn’t match how the purported owner actually does business.
Any one of these signals is not proof. Several together, in a record that happens to be blocking your application, is worth investigating.

The playbook
The right sequence depends on the specifics of the blocker, but the general path is consistent.
Step 1: Triage the office action.
Determine whether the cited record is a pending application oran issued registration, and whether it appears connected to a known sanctions order. The USPTO publishes sanctions orders publicly through its Trademark Decisions and Proceedings search tool. If your blocker shares an attorney, a correspondence email, or an owner address with a sanctioned entity, you have a procedural path forward.

Step 2: Request suspension where appropriate.
If the cited record is plausibly tied to an activeUSPTO investigation or sanctions proceeding, request that examination of your application be suspended pending resolution. Suspension doesn’t concede anything substantive — it just prevents your application from marching to a final refusal while the USPTO is actively cleaning up the obstacle.

Step 3: File a Letter of Protest.
A Letter of Protest is the USPTO’s channel for getting third-party evidence in front of the examiner. It’s not a substitute for a formal proceeding, but it’s the fastest way to surface evidence of fraud — copied specimens, ownership inconsistencies, misuse of attorney credentials — and ask that the examiner take notice.

Step 4: Consider expungement or reexamination.
Both proceedings let third parties challenge registrations on grounds related to non-use. They’re particularly useful against fraudulent registrations because most fraud rings never had real use of the marks they registered. The expungement window runs from year three to year ten of registration; reexamination targets registrations that were never properly used in commerce as of their filing or use date.

Step 5: Refile cleanly if appropriate.
In some cases, the most efficient path is a fresh, clean filing under a slightly modified mark or with a tighter goods description, while the contested blocker is addressed in parallel. Strategic counsel will weigh the cost-benefit of fighting versus repositioning.

Why DIY is genuinely dangerous here
The USPTO sanctions wave is the highest-stakes moment for U.S. trademark prosecution in years. Examiners are now scrutinizing every filing with new tools — pixel analysis on specimens, identity verification on USPTO.gov accounts, cross-referencing of attorney signatures across filings. An applicant who tries to navigate a fraud-blocker situation alone, without understanding which procedural lever to pull and when, can easily make the situation worse: a poorly draftedLetter of Protest gets ignored, an inadequate suspension request gets denied, and the file marches toward final refusal.
This is not the moment to use a low-cost online filing service or to assume your existing counsel— however excellent at other matters — has current visibility into how the USPTO is actually handling these situations.

How Kaleidoscope Law approaches it
I spent ten years inside the USPTO as an Examining Attorney before founding Kaleidoscope. I know how examiners think about suspended applications, what evidence they need to act on a Letter of Protest, and what procedural posture maximizes the chance your application gets to registration without years of delay.

If your application has been refused based on a prior mark that doesn’t quite add up, the first move is a 15-minute strategy call to assess the situation. We’ll review the cited record, identify whether it shows the markers of a sanctioned filing pattern, and map out the cleanest path to clearing it.
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On March 24, 2026, Alix Earle finally solved the puzzle her fans have been tracking for weeks: Reale Actives. While the skincare community is talking about mandelic acid, brand owners should be looking at the name itself.

Alix didn’t just pick a pretty word. “Reale” is an anagram of her surname, Earle. This isn’t just a clever play on her brand mantra (“Real you is perfect you”); it’s a defensive legal maneuver:

Under Section 2(e)(4), the USPTO often refuses marks that are “primarily merely a surname.” By scrambling the letters of her last name into “Reale,” she bypasses that specific refusal while still keeping her identity baked into the brand’s DNA.

While “Alix Earle” is a famous name, registering a full name as a trademark can be legally messy. “Reale” is inherently more distinctive as a brand name, making it easier to defend against copycats.

In my 10 years at the USPTO, I saw countless founders struggle because they were too attached to using their actual surname. Alix’s team clearly understood that a derivative of a name is often stronger than the name itself.

If your surname is common (or even if it’s famous), consider the “Scramble Strategy.” It creates a unique “badge of origin” that is easier to register and harder for competitors to confuse.

Disclaimer: I am a former USPTO Trademark Examining Attorney. This analysis is for educational purposes only. It is a private legal opinion and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the USPTO.