The IP Runway: Issue No. 16
Intellectual property insights for the global business of fashion.
When the Fight Over a Gucci Bag Is About How It Was Printed
Edition sixteen is about who owns the way a Gucci bag is printed.
Most of the disputes we follow are about a name, a logo, or a shape. This one is about a method: how decoration gets printed onto leather. On October 21, the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court, a European court that hears patent disputes for participating EU countries, ruled in a case between Gucci and the Belgian printing company Agfa.
Agfa’s infringement claim against Gucci was dismissed, and most of its patent was revoked in five countries.
The case, fast
Agfa owns a European patent, EP 3 388 490, which relates to making decorated natural leather. In 2023 it sued nine Gucci subsidiaries before the court’s Hamburg local division. The dispute centered on Gucci’s Pikarar collection.
The patent covers a way of adding decorative images to leather. One feature in the claims concerned the base coat laid down before the printing, which had to have an “achromatic” colour other than black. In plain terms, that means a colour with no dominant hue. Whether Gucci’s base coat fit that description was a central question.
On April 30, 2025, Hamburg ruled that Gucci did not infringe. It also refused to revoke the patent, which left Agfa holding a valid patent it could not use against Gucci. Both sides appealed.
After a hearing on September 10, the Court of Appeal decided on October 21. Agfa’s appeal was rejected. The infringement action was dismissed. The patent was revoked for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden, except for a narrow set of claims built on claim 5 and claim 9, each read together with claim 1.
For those surviving claims, the court did not say that Gucci was innocent in some larger sense. It said Agfa had not shown that Gucci infringed. Agfa was also ordered to bear the costs of the infringement action and the revocation counterclaims at both instances.
A printing method, a luxury house, and a patent mostly gone.
The earlier product that did the damage
A patent has to describe something new. That is where Gucci’s own history came in.
Gucci argued that its earlier products, including the Flora Wallet from its 2017 Flora line, showed that the patented features already existed before Agfa filed. At Hamburg, that argument did not succeed. On appeal, it did. The Court of Appeal held that the Flora products were public prior use, and that they destroyed the novelty of the patent’s broader claims.
The appeal court also set out its own reading of the patent’s wording on base-coat colour, a point that sat at the heart of the infringement dispute. Even so, for the claims that remained, Agfa fell short on proof.
A smaller point sits inside this one. Agfa’s patent was never about how a Gucci bag looks. It was about a technique that could be used on many kinds of leather goods. That is why a printing company, and not a rival fashion house, was the one in court.
Why this matters beyond one bag
Patents protect how things are made. Trademarks protect names, and copyright and design rights protect how things look. A luxury product can sit inside all of them at once, and a dispute over technique can reach any house that uses the technique in question.
A house can be the defendant. Most luxury stories show the brand enforcing its rights. Here Gucci spent years defending a technology claim and ended up helping to dismantle the patent.
One ruling can reach several countries. A revocation by the Unified Patent Court covered five countries in a single decision, instead of five separate national cases.
An archive can be evidence. A house’s own earlier products can decide whether a later patent was ever valid. Records of what was sold, and when, matter. For a house, old collections are not only heritage. They can be proof.
One caution. This concerns one patent and one set of products. Parts of Agfa’s patent survived, and the court’s finding on those parts was about proof, not a ruling that such printing can never infringe.
Reading the runway
Behind the leather, the stitching, and the logo, there is technology, and technology can be owned by someone else.
Luxury sells the finished object, but the finished object rests on processes, and processes belong to someone. This week, a European appeals court dismissed a printing company’s infringement claim against a famous house and held that much of the company’s patent should not stand.
Gucci went in as the defendant and came out with the infringement claim dismissed and most of the patent revoked. For luxury, the lesson is quiet: the question is not only who made it, but who has the right to make it that way.
More soon.
The IP Runway
Sources: Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court, decision of October 21, 2026 (Agfa NV v. Gucci, EP 3 388 490); JUVE Patent and Potter Clarkson, on the Hamburg Local Division decision of April 30, 2025; Law360, World IP Review and IPWatchdog, on the appeal ruling.
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