Why is Patagonia suing Pattie Gonia?
Last year, Pattie Gonia filed a trademark application for exclusive rights to use her brand to sell merchandise and to promote activism and online marketing. In its complaint, Patagonia said the application “reflects Pattie Gonia’s departure from discrete use of a persona to engage in activism” and instead confirms the activist’s “intent instead to launch a wideranging commercial enterprise under the PATTIE GONIA brand.”
In a May 27 statement posted to its website, Patagonia said that Pattie Gonia violated a previous agreement the two had struck over the use of the name and logo—though Pattie Gonia denies that any such agreement was reached. “There was no agreement,” she said. “In 2022, when I was collaborating with a third party, Patagonia asked me to follow certain terms, and I did. That wasn’t a broad agreement about my future.”
In a January statement, the brand noted that, while it did not want to sue Wiley, it had to enforce its trademark universally in order to protect it from misuse. “To maintain our own rights, we must prevent others from copying our brands and logos. If we do not, we risk losing the ability to defend our trademarks entirely,” the company wrote. “To put a finer point on it, we cannot selectively choose to enforce our rights based on whether we agree with a particular point of view. Inconsistent enforcement might prevent us from stopping entities like the oil and gas lobby, counterfeiters, hate groups, or other bad actors from using the Patagonia name and logo. These are not hypothetical examples; they are real instances of past trademark infringements we successfully stopped only because we have been consistent in defending our rights.”