UGG® vs. “ugg boots”: The Trademark Story

One word, two meanings

A trademark is a name or symbol that tells buyers who made a product. A generic term is the ordinary name for a type of product, and nobody can own it. The same word can be one in one country and the other somewhere else, because trademark rights are territorial: each country registers marks and judges disputes under its own law, based on what the word means to its own public.

That is exactly what happened with "ugg". In Australia, the word is widely treated as the everyday name for a flat-soled sheepskin boot with the fleece on the inside. In the United States, courts have found that buyers understand UGG® as a brand belonging to Deckers Outdoor Corporation, and the company holds registrations for the mark in many other countries.

Why "ugg" is a generic term in Australia

Sheepskin boots called "ugg", "ugh" or "ug" boots were made and sold by many Australian businesses for decades, and the Australian National Dictionary Centre records the word from the late 1960s (see our history guide). The dictionary centre describes "ugg boot" today as an everyday term rather than a brand.

The Australian Government has taken the same view in public. In a 2021 brief to the US Supreme Court, it described "ugg" as the generic descriptor for this style of boot in Australia. Deckers' own annual reports acknowledge the point from the other side: they say a claim that "ugg" is a generic term "was successful in Australia", while similar claims have been rejected by courts in the United States, China, Türkiye and the Netherlands.

In Australia, Deckers does not hold the word itself as a trademark. ABC News reported in 2021 that the company's Australian trademark covers its own stylized logo, and that many companies there sell products labeled as ugg boots. Local makers organized to defend the term: the Australian Sheepskin Association says it was formed after Deckers threatened Australian manufacturers in early 2004 over their use of the word.

Shane Stedman's marks

The Australian story starts with a surfer. According to a 2018 US federal court opinion summarizing the record, Shane Stedman registered "UGH-BOOTS" as an Australian trademark for boots, shoes and slippers in 1971 and registered "UGH" in 1982. A 2006 summary by the Australian law firm Griffith Hack gives the registration numbers as 245662 and 373173.

The UGH-BOOTS registration later passed to Deckers. The US court opinion says Deckers bought it in 1996, while some other accounts say 1995, the year Deckers acquired the UGG business from founder Brian Smith's company, Ugg Holdings.

The 2006 removals

In the early 2000s, Australian sheepskin makers challenged Deckers' Australian registrations. Their main tool was a "non-use" application: under Australian law, a registered trademark can be removed if its owner has not used it enough.

• UGH-BOOTS: on January 16, 2006, a delegate of the Registrar of Trade Marks at IP Australia decided that the registration should be removed for non-use. The application was brought by Bruce and Bronwyn McDougall of Uggs-N-Rugs in Western Australia, according to Griffith Hack, which reported that Deckers did not appeal. The case is reported as Deckers Outdoor Corporation v B&B McDougal [2006] ATMO 5.
• UGH: the "UGH" registration was also removed for non-use after an application by Mortels Sheepskin Factory, once Deckers withdrew its opposition, Griffith Hack reported.

Two details are often misunderstood. First, the removals were decided on non-use, not on whether the word is generic. Deckers stressed at the time that a non-use challenge looks only at whether the mark was used enough, not at its validity, and Griffith Hack noted that genericness could be decided only by the Federal Court of Australia, not by the Trade Marks Office. Second, Deckers said the decision had no binding effect on its other Australian registrations, including its UGG AUSTRALIA logo, or on its rights in other countries; at the time, it said the UGG mark was registered in the United States and more than 40 other countries.

How UGG is protected elsewhere

In the United States, protection came gradually. The 2018 court opinion records that the US Patent and Trademark Office refused Brian Smith's 1980 application to register "UGG" because it found that the word did not serve to identify and distinguish his goods. A ram logo containing the name was registered in 1987, and in May 1996 Ugg Holdings, by then owned by Deckers, received a registration for the word UGG. The registration Deckers enforced in its later litigation is US Registration No. 3,050,925, issued in 2006. By 2018, Deckers held eleven US registrations containing the UGG mark.

Outside the US, Deckers' annual report for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026 says it holds registrations for its marks in many countries, including Canada, China, the United Kingdom, various European Union countries, Japan and Korea. It does not give a total count.

The US case: Deckers v. Australian Leather

The best-known clash between the two meanings of "ugg" played out in a US federal court in Chicago between 2016 and 2021.

Background

Australian Leather Pty Ltd is a sheepskin boot maker run by Adnan "Eddie" Oygur, whose warehouse ABC News placed in Western Sydney. In 2016 Deckers sued the company and Oygur in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Case No. 1:16-cv-03676). The claims included infringement and counterfeiting of the UGG trademark, infringement of Deckers' CARDY trademark, infringement of four design patents and related state-law claims. According to the court, the company first sold products to US buyers in October 2014, and its invoices showed 33 internet orders for 42 products from American customers between 2014 and 2016, including purchases by Deckers' investigators.

The generic-word defense (2018)

The defendants argued that "ugg" is a generic word for sheepskin boots, so the UGG trademark should not be enforceable against them. In a September 13, 2018 opinion, Judge Manish S. Shah rejected that defense. He held that "no reasonable factfinder could conclude that ugg is or ever was a generic word for sheepskin boots in the U.S.", that "generic usage in Australia is not enough on its own to infer generic meaning in the United States", and that the "doctrine of foreign equivalents", which US courts apply to words from foreign languages, "is not a perfect fit" for a word passing from one variety of English to another. The court also cited a 2017 survey in which 98% of respondents viewed UGG as a brand name.

Verdict and judgment (2019–2020)

After a four-day trial, a jury found on May 10, 2019 that Australian Leather and Oygur had each willfully infringed Deckers' UGG and CARDY trademarks and had each willfully counterfeited the UGG trademark, and it awarded $450,000 in statutory damages. Under US law, a "counterfeit" in this sense is a mark identical with, or substantially indistinguishable from, a registered mark. The parties had stipulated that Deckers' design patents and CARDY mark were valid and infringed. The court entered final judgment on February 6, 2020, making the defendants jointly responsible for the $450,000 and permanently barring them from using the UGG mark, in any spelling, on products sold in the United States, including by geo-blocking their website.

Appeal and Supreme Court (2021)

Because the case included design patent claims, the appeal went to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which affirmed the judgment on May 7, 2021 without a written opinion. Australian Leather then asked the US Supreme Court to hear the case (No. 21-513), and the Commonwealth of Australia filed a brief supporting the request, arguing that US courts should treat generic terms from Australian English the way they treat generic words from foreign languages. The Supreme Court denied the petition on December 6, 2021. A denial is not a ruling on the merits, but it left the lower courts' decisions in place.

Aftermath

After the Supreme Court's decision, Oygur's lawyer, former Australian senator Nick Xenophon, said his client faced "a bill of $3.4 million" and possible bankruptcy, ABC News reported. That figure is the defense's own claim; the court's judgment awarded $450,000 in statutory damages plus costs.

What it means for shoppers

• In Australia, "ugg boot" is a normal product description, and many local brands sell genuine sheepskin boots under that name.
• Outside Australia, including the United States and the United Kingdom, UGG is a registered trademark. Boots from other makers that are marketed to buyers in those countries as "UGG" or "ugg boots" may infringe that trademark, even when they are genuinely made in Australia from real sheepskin. That is mainly a legal risk for sellers, but shipments of goods carrying a registered trademark without the owner's permission can also be delayed or seized by customs in some countries.
• Not a fake, not an UGG product. A sheepskin boot sold under another brand name is a different product, not a counterfeit copy of an UGG product. The questions are what the product and listing say, and where it is being sold. Read the brand name on the boot and the label, and check who the seller is.
• Buying the UGG brand? Buy from UGG or an established retailer and use our authenticity guide. If you want an Australian-made sheepskin boot from another brand, buy it under that brand's own name.

When posting on UGG Review, please don't report another brand's sheepskin boots as counterfeit UGG products just because they are called "ugg boots". Our Community Guidelines explain how to write a fair, factual report, and genuine counterfeit alerts belong on our report form.

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