By: Grace Lamendola
Puma is not taking its latest loss quietly. After the EU General Court refused to invalidate a rival’s registered design for a textured shoe sole, the sportswear giant’s top IP lawyer is going public with a warning: the ruling, he says, exposes a soft spot in EU design law that rivals could use to sidestep established designs with little more than a few cosmetic tweaks.
The case is Puma SE v EUIPO – Sir Safety System SpA (Case T-376/25), and on September 2, the General Court sided against Puma, upholding a March 2025 decision from the EUIPO’s Third Board of Appeal (Case R 1137/2024-3). Puma’s general counsel, Neil Narriman, is calling it a “serious loophole,” one he argues lets competitors ride the coattails of an established design while claiming just enough daylight to survive an invalidity challenge.
THE BACKGROUND
At the center of the dispute is a registered Community design held by Sir Safety System, an Assisi, Italy-based maker of safety and protective footwear. The design covers a pebbled, textured outsole. Puma tried to get it invalidated, arguing that it was too close to one of its own earlier sole designs to clear the novelty and individual character bar set by Article 6 of the Community Design Regulation (Reg. 6/2002), the provision that asks whether a design creates a different overall impression on the “informed user” compared to what came before.
Both the EUIPO’s Invalidity Division and its Board of Appeal disagreed with Puma, and the General Court has now backed that read. According to the court, an informed user, someone reasonably familiar with footwear but not a designer or technical expert, would spot enough differences between the two soles that Sir Safety System’s design doesn’t lean on Puma’s.
THE RULING
Puma’s argument, as Narriman tells it, is that the differences the court relied on don’t amount to much: spacing between the pebbled texture, slightly different contouring, minor proportional shifts. In his telling, these are the kind of adjustments any competitor could make without doing any real design work of its own. Narriman has called the court’s application of the individual character test a “flawed assessment,” one that in his view allows a design to piggyback on a predecessor’s overall silhouette while claiming just enough separation to survive.
That’s the loophole Puma is pointing to. If minor, easily replicable tweaks are enough to clear the individual character bar, brand owners with genuinely distinctive designs may struggle to police lookalikes short of a full infringement suit, and they’ll have an even harder time invalidating a competitor’s registration before it becomes a problem.
Whether Puma will push the case further is an open question. Appeals from the General Court to the CJEU are narrow by design, largely confined to points of law rather than a fresh look at how the informed user test was applied to the facts, which is exactly the kind of assessment Puma is objecting to here.
NOT THE FIRST SOLE-RELATED STUMBLE
This is not the first time Puma has come up short trying to use the individual character standard to police the space around its shoe designs, and it’s not the first time a sole has been the sticking point. Puma has separately lost ground over the Creeper design at the General Court, in that case after Rihanna’s own Instagram posts were found to have disclosed the design before Puma filed for protection, wiping out its individual character before a rival ever entered the picture. In a separate dispute over a different registered sole design, the General Court likewise sided against Puma, finding that despite similarities in the outsole, differences elsewhere on the shoe were enough to leave the two designs with distinct overall impressions. Taken together, the pattern suggests Puma’s sole designs keep landing on the wrong side of the individual character line, whether the opposing party is a global retailer, a safety footwear maker, or the brand’s own influencer marketing.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Puma’s frustration lands squarely in the middle of a live fight over how forgiving the “informed user” standard should be, and the case law is not moving in one direction.
Just months earlier, the CJEU’s decision in Deity Shoes v. Mundorama Confort and Stay Design (C-323/24) went the other way on a similar question, finding that designs built from supplier catalogues, with only limited customization layered on top, can still clear the individual character bar. Following a fashion trend, the court held, doesn’t shrink a designer’s room to maneuver. Crocs hit the same wall in its fight against German brand Laufsteg, where the EUIPO’s Board of Appeal found that differences in heel shape, embroidery, and sole design were enough to give a moccasin-style shoe its own identity, even in a notoriously crowded category.
Taken together, the rulings suggest EU adjudicators are, if anything, growing more comfortable finding individual character in designs that sit close to their predecessors, a trend that cuts against brand owners like Puma who are counting on the opposite outcome. Whether that amounts to a loophole or just a properly applied legal standard may depend on which side of the invalidity petition you’re sitting on.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR BRANDS
If the informed user standard keeps bending toward smaller and smaller differences being enough, the practical lesson for brand owners is not to rely on invalidity actions as a backstop. As TFL has previously discussed in the context of building a design protection strategy around a signature product, individual character is assessed through visual comparison, but a strong evidentiary record, consistent design cues across seasons, and a rolling registration strategy all shape how much room a brand has to argue that its silhouette dominates the overall impression. For a brand like Puma, which has now run into the individual character wall from more than one direction, that may be the more durable strategy than betting on any single invalidity fight to hold a lookalike at bay.
Open Bench 