Why Bayou Grande Matters If You’re Choosing a Brand Name
If you’re picking a business name and thinking about federal trademark protection, the Federal Circuit’s recent Bayou Grande decision offers some practical guidance—especially if your proposed name comes from a foreign language or has more than one possible meaning.
At its core, the case is about a question every brand owner eventually faces: is my business name protectable, or is it too generic to own?
What Is a Generic Name—and Why Can’t You Register It?
A generic term is the common name for a product or service itself. Examples are easy:
- You can’t register “Coffee Shop” for café services.
- You can’t register “Shoes” for footwear.
- You can’t register “Law Firm” for legal services.
Why? Because trademark law isn’t supposed to give one company exclusive rights to the words everyone else needs to describe what they sell. Generic terms belong to the public.
Once a term is deemed generic, it’s permanently unregistrable—no amount of advertising, longevity, or success can fix that. That’s why genericness is the most serious problem a brand name can have.
How the USPTO Tried to Label KAHWA as Generic
Bayou Grande has operated coffee shops under the name KAHWA since 2008. When it applied to register the name, the USPTO refused, arguing that:
- Kahwa can mean “coffee” in Arabic, and
- Kahwa can also refer to a type of Kashmiri green tea.
Because cafés sell coffee and tea, the USPTO concluded that KAHWA was either generic or, at minimum, merely descriptive of café services.
This kind of reasoning is not uncommon. The Office often asks: Does this word name the thing being sold, or a key feature of it? If yes, registration is denied.
The Federal Circuit Pushes Back
The Federal Circuit reversed the refusal across the board.
First, it held that the doctrine of foreign equivalents—the rule that sometimes requires foreign words to be translated into English—does not apply when a term has a well-established alternative meaning. Here, the Board itself admitted that kahwa is widely recognized as a specific tea from Kashmir. That alone was enough to make automatic translation improper.
Second—and more importantly for brand owners—the court rejected the USPTO’s evidentiary shortcuts. There was no evidence that any café or coffee shop in the United States actually sells kahwa tea. At oral argument, the PTO conceded that point.
Without real-world evidence, the court held, the USPTO could not claim that KAHWA was generic or descriptive of café services. Speculation about what a business might sell someday is not enough.
Why This Matters When You’re Naming a Business
If you’re evaluating a potential trademark, Bayou Grande reinforces several key principles:
- A name is generic only if consumers understand it as the name of the product or service itself—not because it has a translation or theoretical meaning.
- Foreign-language terms are not automatically generic just because they translate to something descriptive elsewhere.
- The USPTO must rely on actual marketplace evidence, not assumptions.
- Longstanding use of a name as a brand (rather than as a product label) can be powerful.
At the same time, the case is a reminder that genericness is a bright line. If your proposed name truly is the common name for what you sell, trademark law won’t save it.
Choosing a business name isn’t just a marketing decision—it’s a legal one. A name that feels distinctive to you can still trigger a genericness or descriptiveness refusal if the USPTO believes it describes the services themselves.
Bayou Grande shows that those refusals can be beaten—but only with the right facts, evidence, and strategy. That’s why involving trademark counsel early, before a name is locked in, is often the most cost-effective branding decision a business can make.