Ugg: how an Australian generic became an American trademark

Ask any Australian of a certain age and they'll tell you the same thing: ugg boots were just what you wore. Pulled on after the beach, shuffled around the house in, dragged to the corner shop on a cold morning without a second thought. The word "ugg" wasn't a brand name — it was a thing, like thongs or bathers. Generic. Descriptive. Australian as a Hills Hoist.

Which is precisely why it came as such a shock when Australian sheepskin bootmakers started receiving cease-and-desist letters from a company in Goleta, California.

Where the word came from

The etymology is contested, but the most widely accepted account traces "ugg" to the 1950s and 1960s Australian surf culture, used as simple shorthand for ugly boots — warm, shapeless, functional. Surfers wore them to keep their feet warm between sessions. Some accounts credit a Sydney surfer by the name of Shane Stedman with registering an "UGG BOOTS" trademark in Australia in the early 1970s, though trademark records and subsequent legal proceedings have made that history somewhat murky over time.

What's clear is that by the 1980s, several Australian manufacturers were exporting sheepskin boots to the United States under names including "Ugg" and variants of it. One of those exporters was a Perth-born surfer and entrepreneur named Brian Smith, who began selling sheepskin boots out of his car in California in the early 1980s and eventually founded a company he called UGG Imports.

Smith's business grew. In 1995, he sold UGG Holdings — and, critically, its US trademark registrations — to Deckers Outdoor Corporation, then better known for its Teva sandals. Deckers paid a reported sum widely described at the time as modest relative to what the brand would eventually become worth. Smith has since said publicly that he always believed the trademark could be defended; he just didn't anticipate quite how aggressively Deckers would pursue it.

What Deckers actually owns — and where

This is where the story gets genuinely complicated, and where a lot of popular retelling goes wrong.

Deckers holds trademark registrations for UGG (and variations) in a large number of countries, including the United States, China, Japan, and across much of Europe. In those jurisdictions, the word functions legally as a brand name, not a generic term. That's the product of Deckers investing heavily in trademark maintenance and enforcement over decades.

Australia is different. Australian trademark law has historically treated "ugg boots" as a generic, descriptive term — the kind of term that cannot be exclusively owned because it simply describes a category of product. IP Australia, the federal government body that administers trademark registrations, has generally reflected this position. Australian manufacturers have, for most of the relevant period, been able to use "ugg boots" descriptively in the domestic market without infringing a Deckers registration.

But "for most of the relevant period" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because Deckers has tested those boundaries more than once.

The Ugh-Boots fight and the Australian makers

The company that brought the issue into sharpest focus for Australian manufacturers was Mortels Sheepskin Factory, a business that had been producing and selling sheepskin footwear in Australia for decades. When Deckers began sending letters to Australian retailers and manufacturers asserting trademark rights, Mortels and other local producers pushed back hard — publicly and legally.

The core argument from the Australian side was straightforward: "ugg boots" is a generic term in Australia. You cannot trademark the name of a product category any more than you could trademark "running shoes" or "leather belt". To grant Deckers exclusive rights over the phrase in Australia would be to hand a foreign company control over an entire domestic product category that Australian craftspeople had built without any contribution from that company.

Deckers did hold some Australian trademark registrations at various points — the history of those registrations, challenges, and lapses is detailed and at times contradictory depending on which filing period you examine. The critical practical outcome, confirmed through IP Australia processes and sustained by the general commercial and legal understanding in Australia, is that Australian businesses can use the term "ugg boots" generically to describe and sell their products domestically. Deckers' enforcement focus has largely been directed at export markets, particularly the US, where their trademark position is unambiguous.

That distinction — enforceable overseas, not enforceable generically at home — has shaped the entire commercial landscape for Australian makers.

The export trap

Here is the practical bind that still catches Australian sheepskin bootmakers: you can make ugg boots in Australia, sell them in Australia under that name, build a perfectly legitimate local business. But the moment you try to export them to the United States and describe them as "ugg boots", you are, under US trademark law, infringing a registered Deckers mark. The same applies in most of Europe and a number of other major markets.

For small Australian manufacturers, this is not a theoretical problem. It means that a genuinely Australian-made product, using the Australian term that has always described it, cannot legally be marketed under that name in some of the world's largest consumer markets. Deckers has pursued infringement actions against importers and retailers in the US who have stocked Australian-made boots described as "ugg".

The counter-argument from Deckers is equally straightforward: they acquired the trademark lawfully, they invested in building the brand globally, and trademark law exists precisely to protect that investment. UGG is now, by most measures, a billion-dollar brand. Deckers would argue that the brand equity they created is what gives the word commercial meaning in America — not a generic heritage that most American consumers had never encountered.

I'll admit there's something to that argument, even if it stings. The average American consumer buying UGG boots in a mall in Minnesota in 2005 was responding to a brand Deckers had built, not to some inherited cultural knowledge of Australian surf culture. Trademark law doesn't particularly care about etymological justice.

The counterfeit problem compounds everything

One of the stranger side effects of this situation is that Deckers' aggressive global trademark enforcement has, at times, swept up genuine Australian-made sheepskin boots alongside the vast quantities of counterfeit product that flooded the market — particularly from China — as the UGG brand became globally valuable.

Deckers has been notably litigious in the US and European courts against counterfeit operations, and that enforcement has had mixed results. The counterfeit market for UGG-branded footwear became substantial enough that it drew serious legal action and media coverage throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Australian makers caught in this environment have had to position themselves carefully — leaning into "Australian-made", "genuine sheepskin", country-of-origin branding — to differentiate from both the Deckers product and the counterfeit flood.

Some have done this very effectively. Companies like Ugg since 1974 (which has its own history of trademark skirmishes) and various other Australian producers have built export businesses around the provenance story rather than the word itself, trading on the "Made in Australia" credential in markets where that carries weight.

Where things stand

The fundamental legal and commercial positions have not shifted dramatically in recent years. Deckers continues to hold and enforce its trademark registrations in major export markets. Australian manufacturers continue to use "ugg boots" generically at home. The tension persists whenever an Australian business tries to scale beyond the domestic market.

There have been ongoing calls — from manufacturers, from some politicians, from consumer advocates — for the Australian government to do more to protect the generic status of the term, or to pursue some form of geographical indication protection similar to what exists for Champagne or Parmigiano-Reggiano in European trade frameworks. So far, those calls have not produced anything with teeth.

The broader irony is one that comes up repeatedly in Australian brand history. A local product or term, built from the ground up by Australian makers and embedded in Australian culture, acquires global commercial value only after a foreign company acquires rights to it and markets it internationally. By the time the value is obvious, the Australian connection has been largely extracted.

It's a pattern worth watching, and one I've written about in the context of other Iconic Brand Histories on this site — and it connects directly to the wider story of iconic Australian brands now owned overseas. Ugg is perhaps the most visible example, partly because the word itself remains in active daily use in Australia, carrying a meaning that no trademark filing can quite extinguish.

Next time you kick off your ugg boots at the back door, you're performing an act of quiet cultural defiance. Probably the cheapest kind.