Tiffany Is on Round Three of a Trademark Fight with a Sanitary Pad Brand

The IP Runway: Issue No. 8

Intellectual property insights for the global business of fashion.

When Two Brands That Share Nothing Still End Up in Court

Edition eight is about a jewelry house and a feminine hygiene brand, fighting over five letters, for the third time.

The case, fast

Alffany, styled 艾芙尼 in Chinese, is a feminine hygiene brand owned by Shanghai Shili Brand Management Co., formerly known as Haitao (Shanghai) Investment Co., with trademark registrations covering daily-use goods, clothing, and footwear.

Tiffany & Co. argues the name is too close to its own. In English, Alffany shares its final five letters with Tiffany. In Chinese, Tiffany’s name, 蒂芙尼, and Alffany’s share two of three characters. Tiffany is seeking to cancel Alffany’s registration through China’s trademark authorities, with the dispute now on appeal before the Beijing High People’s Court following a hearing this July.

This isn’t Tiffany’s first attempt. In 2017, it successfully invalidated an earlier Alffany trademark on similarity grounds. In 2025, it tried again against a different Alffany registration, and lost, the opposition failed and the mark was approved for use. The current appeal is round three, spanning nearly a decade of intermittent legal contact between two companies that make nothing resembling each other’s products.

A jewelry house and a sanitary pad brand, fighting over five shared letters, for the third time in under a decade.

Why this isn’t a simple infringement case

The dispute looks, on its surface, like a straightforward trademark fight. It isn’t structured like one.

This is an administrative proceeding, a fight over whether a government trademark decision should be upheld or reversed, not a civil lawsuit. No compensation is being sought at all. The entire dispute is about whether Alffany’s mark should exist on the register in the first place, not about who owes whom money for past sales.

Alffany maintains its name has nothing to do with Tiffany, the company says 艾芙尼 evokes the Chinese phrase for “to cherish and protect you,” not a luxury jeweler. Whether that explanation holds up is now for the appellate court to decide, but it’s a live, unresolved dispute, not a settled one, and it’s been going on, on and off, since 2017.

Three rounds. One company. No damages ever sought, in any of them.

Why this matters beyond one hygiene brand

Trademark protection doesn’t require competing products. Tiffany and Alffany don’t compete for the same customer in any meaningful sense, jewelry and sanitary pads sit nowhere near each other on a shelf. Trademark law doesn’t require direct competition to justify enforcement, only a real risk that consumers could be confused about the source or the brand doing the selling, which is exactly the theory Tiffany is testing here, for the third time.

This case isn’t happening in isolation either. Just weeks before this dispute drew fresh attention, Louis Vuitton, another LVMH-owned house, won a separate trademark fight in China against a bubble tea chain. One enforcement action from one house is a data point. Two, from two different houses under the same parent company, arriving in the same season, starts to read as a pattern, and Chinese commentators have already drawn that exact comparison, not entirely favorably.

Administrative enforcement is a quieter tool than litigation, and brands are leaning on it more. Most headlines go to lawsuits with damages attached. Trademark cancellation proceedings rarely make news on their own, until they’re part of a pattern big enough to notice. This case is a reminder that a company’s IP strategy in a market like China often runs on two tracks at once, public lawsuits and quiet administrative filings, and the second track can carry just as much reputational weight as the first.

Reading the runway

This case hasn’t ended. It’s still sitting in front of an appellate court, with no damages on the table and no verdict yet, the same place it’s sat, on and off, since 2017.

What makes it worth watching isn’t the outcome of one filing. It’s what a third round over the same five letters says about how far a trademark owner will go to hold a line, and how that persistence reads to the public once it starts happening more than once in a single company’s orbit.

More soon.

The IP Runway

Sources: Global Times, RADII, DAO Insights, The Storm Media, and Jing Daily, reporting on the Tiffany & Co. v. Alffany trademark cancellation proceeding before the Beijing High People’s Court.