Beyoncé’s attorneys are once again asking federal regulators to register Blue Ivy Carter’s name as a trademark, more than 12 years after she and Jay-Z first sought to lock up the intellectual property rights to their daughter’s name.
In a motion filed last week at the federal trademark office, lawyers for Beyoncé’s company pushed back on a ruling earlier this year that consumers might confuse the name with another Blue Ivy: a single-store clothing boutique in Wisconsin that has used the name since before the young Carter was born.
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The star’s lawyers say that ruling should be overturned, arguing that nobody is going to confuse Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter — once dubbed the “most famous baby in the world” — with a small clothing shop.
“No reasonable consumer would ever suffer any form of confusion when encountering the [store’s] logo, which is used with one small shop in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community with a population of approximately 997 people,” Beyoncé’s attorneys write. “Nor would a reasonable consumer encounter the ‘Blue Ivy Carter’ mark and conclude that the famous Carter family had teamed up with a small shop in rural Wisconsin to launch a clothing line.”
An attorney for Beyoncé’s company did not immediately return a request for comment on the status of the trademark case.
Just weeks after Blue Ivy was born in January 2012, Beyoncé’s BGK Trademark Holdings LLC applied at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register her unusual name as a trademark. The move raised eyebrows at the time, as fans wondered if the couple was commercializing their daughter. But Jay-Z later told Vanity Fair that they merely wanted to prevent her name from being exploited by others.
“People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name,” he told the magazine in 2013. “It wasn’t for us to do anything; as you see, we haven’t done anything.”
More than 12 years later, however, Blue Ivy’s parents have yet to secure that trademark registration.
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For years, the process was bogged down in legal disputes with a woman named Veronica Morales, who runs a lifestyle event planning company under the name “Blue Ivy” and secured her own trademark to it. In 2020, a tribunal at the USPTO rejected Morales’ complaints, ruling that the two sides’ respective offerings were “so dissimilar that confusion is unlikely.”
That ruling seemingly cleared the way for the “Blue Ivy Carter” trademark registration to finally be issued. But attorneys for BGK never moved that application forward, and eventually, the USPTO deemed the application abandoned last year.
In November 2023, Beyoncé’s attorneys applied yet again for the same trademark registration. Like previous efforts, however, the new application quickly hit a roadblock: In April, a trademark examiner issued a tentative ruling that the mark was “confusingly similar” to the name of the Wisconsin clothing store, which has owned a trademark registration on its “Blue Ivy” logo since 2011.
(The Wisconsin boutique itself is not actually involved in the case and has not filed an opposition to the Blue Ivy Carter trademark; instead, the USPTO simply cited the earlier trademark as a reason to deny Beyoncé’s application.)
It was this tentative denial that Beyoncé’s attorneys challenged last week, arguing that Americans know who Blue Ivy Carter is and would never think she was “somehow connected to a lovely boutique shop in a small town in rural Wisconsin.”
“Since the moment she was born, she has resided in the American public’s conscience and thus … the consuming public would associate her with a trademark bearing her name,” BGK’s lawyers write. “The parties each exist and thrive in their own separate worlds and can continue doing so into the future.”
