On January 26, 2024, a French fashion house received a piece of paper from the Beijing Higher People's Court that it had been chasing, in one form or another, for three decades. The ruling, case number (2022)京民终293号, ordered the companies behind a rival brand to stop what they were doing and pay Lacoste 14.8 million yuan in damages, plus another 250,000 yuan in legal costs. Roughly 2 million US dollars, give or take.
The rival's crime? Its crocodile was facing the wrong way. Or, more precisely, its crocodile was facing the other way, and for most of those thirty years Chinese courts had said that was perfectly fine.
This is the story of how a logo that two companies spent half a century telling apart finally became, in the eyes of the law, one logo too many. And like most of the cases in this series, the turning point wasn't really about the picture at all. It was about what Chinese shoppers were reading when they looked at it.
Lacoste's crocodile goes back to the 1920s, when French tennis star René Lacoste picked up "the Crocodile" as a nickname and turned it into the emblem on his shirts. The brand registered the mark in France in 1933 and, notably, in China in 1980, years before it had any real business there.
The second crocodile was born in Singapore in 1947. Crocodile International, the company behind it, built a big Asian clothing business on a reptile that faces left, while Lacoste's faces right. In mainland China, its brand became 卡帝乐鳄鱼 (kǎ dì lè è yú), with "Cartelo" as the English wordmark.
And just to make things properly confusing, there's a third one. Hong Kong's 鳄鱼恤 (è yú xù), Crocodile Garments, dates to 1952. Here's the plot twist: from 1980 to 2021 it served as Lacoste's exclusive agent in Hong Kong and Macau. So for four decades, one crocodile was selling another crocodile's shirts while a third crocodile fought the second one in court. You couldn't write this.
The two main crocodiles first collided in the 1960s, when Lacoste tried to enter Japan and found the Singapore company had already registered a crocodile there. The two sides settled on an idea that would shape everything afterward: the crocodiles face different directions, so nobody will be confused.
In 1983 they made it formal. A coexistence agreement let both brands operate in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Taiwan, and Lacoste paid 1.5 million US dollars to cover the Singapore company's past costs of protecting its mark. Five territories. Not one word about mainland China.
In 1983 that probably looked like a reasonable omission. China's consumer economy barely existed. Ten years later it was the most important blank space in the whole agreement.
On December 24, 1993, the Singapore company applied to register its "CARTELO and design" mark in mainland China. Lacoste opposed. On October 22, 2003, the Trademark Office ruled against Lacoste. The Trademark Review and Adjudication Board agreed on June 30, 2005. Lacoste sued and actually won at first instance, but the Beijing Higher People's Court reversed that in early 2008 and let the mark stand.
The reasoning is worth reading closely, because it's basically a linguistic argument. The court said the mark was a composite, and its dominant element was the invented word "CARTELO." The crocodile and the colored background were secondary. Yes, the crocodile looked a lot like Lacoste's, with the head and tail flipped. But the wording, the pronunciation and the overall look were different enough that an ordinary shopper paying ordinary attention could tell them apart.
The two brands had also simply been living side by side. Commentary at the time pointed out that the two crocodiles had competed and coexisted in China for 14 years. At a related hearing in November 2008, the Singapore side's lawyer argued Lacoste had mostly built its business in Europe, while his client held the stronger position in China. The price points backed that up: Lacoste shirts started above 500 yuan and belts at 1,000, while most Cartelo products sold below 500. The Singapore company had committed 120 million yuan to a Shanghai headquarters building. This was not a fly-by-night knockoff. It was an established competitor.
Here's where my forensic linguist brain starts tapping on the glass. A court can say a mark is "dominated by the word CARTELO." But how do Chinese consumers actually talk about these brands?
They don't say CARTELO. They say 鳄鱼 (è yú), crocodile. When they need to tell them apart, they add a country: 法国鳄鱼 (Fǎguó è yú), "French crocodile," for Lacoste, and 新加坡鳄鱼 (Xīnjiāpō è yú), "Singapore crocodile," for the other one. Lacoste's official Chinese company name, 拉科斯特 (Lā kē sī tè), lives on legal documents. Almost nobody says it at the mall.
That matters, because in everyday Chinese the brand isn't the word on the tag. The brand is the animal. And the animal is the one thing the two marks share. When Chinese media covered the 2024 ruling, they described shoppers who were 傻傻分不清楚 (shá shǎ fēn bù qīng chu), basically "hopelessly unable to tell them apart," and plenty of social media users who had assumed Cartelo was a 山寨货 (shān zhài huò), a knockoff.
In other words, the 2008 court's assumption that the word would do the distinguishing work only held up as long as the word stayed front and center. Which brings us to what changed.
In 2016, Nanji E-commerce (南极电商, Nánjí diànshāng), a Chinese company known for licensing brand names to manufacturers, bought 95% of Cartelo's owner for close to 600 million yuan and later took full control. By then Cartelo had thousands of stores across China. Licensing is a volume game: you let lots of manufacturers put your mark on lots of products.
And somewhere in that process, the composite mark the court had blessed in 2008 started coming apart. When the Beijing Higher People's Court looked at the products in the new case, it found the "CARTELO and design" mark was no longer used consistently. On some items, "CARTELO" sat off to the left of the crocodile or tucked underneath it, rather than working as the integrated mark that had been approved. The marks at issue now were registrations whose main difference from Lacoste's was, as one summary of the judgment put it, simply which way the crocodile's head pointed.
Take away the dominant word and what's left? A crocodile. And by the court's finding, Lacoste's right-facing crocodile had already been a well-known mark in China since 2006, for clothing.
The defendants leaned on history: the coexistence, the earlier rulings, the old settlement. The court wasn't persuaded. The 1983 agreement covered five named territories, and mainland China wasn't one of them. The earlier case involved a different mark used in a different way at a different time. Coexistence based on a word that has gone quiet is not coexistence anymore.
So the court found the use of the disputed marks on clothing likely to confuse consumers, and on bags, wallets and luggage it found the use rode on Lacoste's reputation. It held four companies jointly liable, including Nanji E-commerce, its Shanghai affiliate that ran the brand website, a Xinjiang licensing company and the Shanghai manufacturer. The 14.8 million yuan judgment stuck.
I bring this case up with clients for one big reason. Brand owners tend to think of their mark as a fixed object: register it, done. But in China a mark is also what people call it, and that spoken name can drift far from the registered one. Lacoste's legal name is 拉科斯特. Its real name, the one that does the commercial work, is 法国鳄鱼. If you don't know what your customers actually call you, you don't really know what you need to protect.
The second lesson is for the other side. A coexistence position is only as strong as the features that made it possible. Cartelo survived the 2008 round because of a word. When licensees let that word slide to the edge of the label, they quietly gave away the very thing that had kept them safe.
And the third lesson is the one Lacoste paid 1.5 million dollars to learn back in 1983: when you draw a map of where you get to do business, check that you didn't leave the biggest country on it blank.
If you're working out how your brand is actually being named, nicknamed or copied in China, that's exactly the kind of question I love digging into. You can see how I work on the Work With Me page.