Beauty Brands Named in Trademark Lawsuit Over Eyeshadow Palette

A skincare brand is taking on LVMH’s beauty manufacturing arm, Marc Jacobs, and a handful of retailers in a new lawsuit over the manufacture and sale of Marc Jacobs eyeshadow palettes sold under the name EYE-CONIC. According to the lawsuit that it filed in a California federal court last month, Amarte USA Holdings alleges that Marc Jacobs offered up makeup products labeled as EYE-CONIC, which were manufactured by LVMH’s Kendo Holdings, and also promoted and sold by Sephora, Walmart, Neiman Marcus Group, and Nordstrom, all of whom are named as defendants in the lawsuit. The issue, according to Amarte, is that it maintains trademark rights in (and a registration for) the EYECONIC mark for use on “eye cosmetics [and] eye creams.” 

Setting the stage in its complaint, Northern California-based Amarte asserts that for over a decade, it has “substantially exclusively and continuously used and promoted” the EYECONIC trademark in connection with its goods to “great success.” In fact, Amarte asserts that its anti-aging eye cream “bearing [the] EYECONIC trademark is one of the company’s bestselling products.” As a result of its use and promotion of EYECONIC in connection with its products, Amarte claims that the purchasing public has come to associate the EYECONIC mark with it.  

Against that background, Amarte asserts that Marc Jacobs, Kendo Holdings, LVMH-owned beauty retailer Sephora, Walmart, Neiman Marcus Group, and Nordstrom (the “defendants”) are (or were) collectively “advertising, marketing, promoting, distributing, selling, and otherwise offering” up Marc Jacobs’s multi-finish eye shadow palette “under the identical or substantially similar EYE-CONIC trademark.” (The allegedly infringing products – which were first introduced by the LVMH-owned brand back in 2017 – are not currently listed for sale on any of the defendants’ websites, and based on TFL’s searches, do not appear to have been sold by the likes of Sephora and co. since 2021.)

Read the source article at thefashionlaw.com