The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Legal decision · 2017–2020
The Alley went viral before it owned its trademark — 7,000 copycats moved in
China's hottest milk tea brand entered the mainland with a pending trademark. Copycats franchised thousands of stores; the courts took three years.
The Alley
What happened
The Alley — 鹿角巷 — was a Taiwanese milk tea brand that went viral in mainland China in 2017 on a single product: brown sugar pearl milk under a deer logo. Its founder Qiu Maoting's company filed the mainland trademark on 1 August 2017, one month before the first stores opened. Registration takes six months to two years. The brand did not wait.
Copycats did. Before The Alley's mark was even published, businesses across China had copied the deer logo and rushed to register '鹿角巷' themselves — 522 trademark records in all. One Guangzhou company, whose legal representative Yin Yan registered her own copyright on the artwork, franchised stores under the name nationwide. The brand said it counted 7,000 copycat stores around it. Qiu Maoting's own application was rejected for similarity to marks filed after his.
The courts took three years. In February 2019 the Guangzhou Tianhe court recognised Yin Yan's copyright; in May, Qiu Maoting's company filed a third-party action, and the Nansha court reversed the judgment, finding his registration and design drafts came first. The Class 43 trademark finally issued in late 2019. By then The Alley had spent nearly 10 million yuan on enforcement and missed the two fastest years of China's milk tea boom; after the ruling, the copycats closed or rebranded.
Why it happened
- Market entry ran ahead of the trademark: registration takes up to two years, and the brand opened stores with an application, not a right.
- China's first-to-file system let copycats register the name — and even a copyright on the logo — then franchise on the strength of it.
- Enforcement was case-by-case: each fake store needed its own action, so 7,000 of them outpaced any legal budget.
The lesson
In first-to-file markets the trademark is the product launch — file years before you open, because the gap between application and registration is where copycats build.
Sources
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