China: Hangzhou Court Recognizes the Sales of Refurbished Secondhand Luxury Bags Constitute Trademark Infringement
Published 10 December 2025
Fei Dang
On November 11, 2025, the People’s Intermediate Court of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province (“the Court”) published details of a case of constituting trademark infringement due to sales of secondhand luxury bags upon being “cut, pieced, revitalized, and reinvented” on social media.
Case Introduction
The plaintiff in this case is the internationally renowned luxury brand Louis Vuitton. The defendant is a company primarily engaged in luggage and leather goods. It reportedly “operates official accounts or stores on multiple e-commerce platforms, openly promoting and selling bags produced by the company. The company's main approach involves using recycled secondhand bags as one of the raw materials for processing. The bag bodies feature registered trademark logos identical or similar to LV's, and the design of multiple bags resembles the brand's classic models.”
Accordingly, the plaintiff brought a lawsuit to the Court and requested the defendant to “immediately cease all acts infringing upon the plaintiff's exclusive rights to its registered trademarks, remove and destroy all infringing goods and inventory, as well as immediately delete all commercial promotional content related to the plaintiff, and publish a clarification statement in the defendant's online and offline stores to eliminate the effects of the infringement.” The defendant argued that its patchwork reconstruction of secondhand packaging bags constituted a design style utilizing repurposed materials and embodied its environmental philosophy, and it had affixed its own registered trademark to the bags. The defendant further argued that the plaintiff's relevant trademark only occupied a small portion of the allegedly infringing bags and served solely as a decorative element, thus not constituting trademark use.
Upon trial, the Court considered that “the recycling and reuse of used goods in the market aligns with environmental policies promoting resource conservation and maximizing utilization and should be encouraged and advocated. However, this does not imply that manufacturers may infringe upon the exclusive rights to registered trademarks lawfully entitled by others during the process of utilizing recycled and reclaimed resources. The recycling and reuse of renewable resources must be conducted in compliance with national laws and regulations, without harming the rights and interests of others or infringing upon their intellectual property rights. It is essential to balance environmental protection and efficient resource utilization with the effective protection of intellectual property rights, thereby achieving a fair equilibrium among the interests of trademark holders, the parties involved, and the broader public.”
The Court further pointed out that, in this case, since the pieced-together leather came from shredded secondhand bags, it was impossible to determine through authentication whether the raw materials originated from genuine products. However, even if such materials were authentic, the prominent four-petal flower, four-pointed star, and overlapping LV letter combinations appearing on the allegedly infringing bags constituted trademark use. Without obtaining authorization from the plaintiff's brand, the use of these trademarks constituted trademark infringement. Furthermore, according to relevant media reports, the defendant also “promoted the alleged infringing bags by marketing them as recycled from secondhand luxury bags. This effectively leveraged the commercial reputation and goodwill of the involved trademark to attract consumers, exceeding the bounds of fair use of recycled materials.”
Thus, the Court determined that the defendant's actions constituted trademark infringement and ordered the defendant to “immediately cease the infringing activities, destroy all inventory, compensate the plaintiff for economic losses amounting to 1.05 million yuan, and publish a statement in their store for three consecutive days to eliminate the adverse impact.” The judgment in this case has now taken effect.
Comment
Unlike typical trademark infringement cases involving the replication or counterfeiting of others' products, this case concerns trademark infringement arising from the sale of secondhand luxury handbags that have undergone “re-collage design.” In this instance, the defendant cut up the leather from authentic secondhand luxury handbags and reassembled it into “brand-new” bags through redesigned patchwork. Although the source of these secondhand luxury bags may have been legitimate, since the leather pieces on the “refurbished” bags still bore multiple registered trademarks of the original trademark owner (such as the ‘LV’ letter combination and the monogram pattern), such use still falls within the scope of “trademark use.”
Article 48 of the Trademark Law provides that “The trademark use referred to in this Law refers to affixing trademarks to goods, the packaging or containers of goods, as well as goods transaction documents, or use of trademarks in advertisements, exhibitions, and other commercial activities for the purpose of identifying the source of goods.” Article 57 thereof further provides that “Any of the following acts shall be an infringement of the exclusive right to use a registered trademark: (1) to use a trademark that is identical with a registered trademark in respect of the identical goods without the authorization from the trademark registrant; (2) to use a trademark similar to the registered trademark on the same kind of goods or to use a trademark identical with or similar to the registered trademark on similar goods without a license from the registrant of that trademark, which is likely to cause confusion; (3) to sell goods that he knows bear a counterfeited registered trademark; … (5) to replace, without the consent of the trademark registrant, its or his registered trademark and market again the goods bearing the replaced trademark; … (7) to cause, in other respects, prejudice to the exclusive right of another person to use a registered trademark.”
It can be seen that despite the redesign and patchwork of the secondhand bags in question, as long as the materials used still bear the plaintiff's highly recognizable and well-known trademarks, consumers remain highly likely to identify these bags as products of the plaintiff's brand or perceive some association between such goods and the plaintiff, thereby causing confusion regarding the source of the goods. In other words, the marks on the original leather materials, even after being reassembled, retain their function of identifying the source of the goods. Therefore, the defendant's use of such trademarks constituted trademark use within the meaning of the Trademark Law. Since the said use of the plaintiff's registered trademark was unauthorized, the defendant's act of using leather bearing the plaintiff's registered trademark to manufacture and sell goods through reassembly not only infringed upon the plaintiff's exclusive right to the relevant trademark but also was suspicious of free-riding on the plaintiff's brand reputation.
In a word, although the law does not prohibit the reuse of old items, such reuse must still be conducted within the framework permitted by law and without infringing upon the rights of others. For example, before modifying and reusing others’ secondhand branded products, the original trademark identification on the product should be removed or covered, and its own trademark identification should be displayed in a prominent position. This ensures that the relevant public can quickly identify the source of the goods and avoids unnecessary legal risks of trademark infringement and/or unfair competition.