For Adidas, it’s three stripes and you’re out.
The athletic wear giant filed a legal complaint on May 1 against Aviator Nation, alleging trademark infringement and breach of contract. According to legal documents, the company believes Aviator Nation’s collection “imitates Adidas‘ three-stripe mark.”
This isn’t Adidas’ first legal go around with Aviator Nation. According to the complaint, filed in an Oregon federal court, the two have signed three separate settlement agreements—one in 2012, another in 2013 and the final in 2022—pertaining to Adidas’ trademarks.
Adidas believes that the California-based brand has violated the terms of its settlements, particularly the 2022 one. In its complaint, Adidas’ counsel contends that Aviator Nation has “continued offering for sale and selling apparel bearing confusingly similar imitations of the three-stripe mark…despite acknowledging Adidas’s rights in the famous three-stripe mark and committing (repeatedly) to stop infringing Adidas’s three-stripe mark in each of the three agreements.”
The complaint shows side-by-side images of a number of different products—sweatshirts, sweatpants and swim trunks among them—that Adidas alleges Aviator Nation sells even though the company “agreed to stop selling” them in the 2022 contract.
