How a Bureaucratic Blunder Handed One Company the Exclusive Rights to a Shade of Orange

You Can't Own a Color. Except When You Can.

The first time most people hear about someone owning a color, they assume it's a metaphor. A brand is so associated with a particular shade that it might as well own it, right? Like how UPS is brown, or how Tiffany's robin's-egg blue is practically trademarked in the cultural imagination.

Except that last one isn't just cultural imagination. Tiffany & Co. actually holds a registered trademark on that specific shade — Pantone 1837, named for the year the company was founded. And they will absolutely send you a letter if you use it.

But Tiffany's trademark is the clean, intentional version of this story. The version that sounds like it was designed by lawyers who knew exactly what they were doing.

The version that belongs on this site is messier. And considerably stranger.

The Accidental Claim

In 1994, a small packaging company in the Midwest — operating in the niche but competitive world of industrial shipping materials — filed a standard trademark application for a new line of protective foam products. The application was meant to register the company's logo and product name. Standard stuff. The kind of paperwork that gets filed thousands of times a year without incident.

What the filing actually included, due to a combination of an overzealous trademark attorney and a description field that was interpreted far more broadly than intended, was a claim on the specific shade of orange used in the foam's coloring.

Not the logo. Not the product name. The color itself, as applied to protective packaging foam.

The USPTO examiner who processed the application flagged it for review — and then, in what the agency later characterized as an administrative oversight during a period of unusually high application volume, approved it anyway.

The Color Nobody Knew Was Taken

For several years, nothing happened. The company operated normally. Competitors used similar shades of orange in their own foam products without incident. The trademark sat in the registry, largely unnoticed, the way a lot of obscure intellectual property does.

Then the company hired a new legal director.

He found the color trademark during a routine review of the company's IP portfolio. And rather than quietly noting it as a probable error, he decided to use it.

Ceased-and-desist letters went out to eleven competing manufacturers. The letters cited the registered trademark and demanded that competitors either stop using the shade of orange in question or pay licensing fees. Several small companies, unable to afford the legal fight, complied immediately. Others reformulated their products to use slightly different shades.

Two larger competitors fought back.

The Legal Battle Over a Crayon Color

What followed was, by the accounts of IP attorneys who followed the case, one of the more surreal trademark disputes of the 1990s. At its core, the question was simple: can a functional color — one used for practical rather than decorative purposes — be trademarked at all?

The answer, it turned out, was complicated.

The Supreme Court had already addressed color trademarks in the 1995 case Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co., ruling that color alone can, under certain circumstances, function as a trademark. The key condition is that the color must have acquired "secondary meaning" — consumers must associate the color specifically with that company's products.

The Midwestern foam company's attorneys argued that their client's orange had acquired exactly that kind of recognition. The competing manufacturers argued that orange foam was a generic industry standard, that the color served a functional purpose (visibility in warehouse environments), and that the original trademark registration had been approved in error.

The case bounced through federal courts for nearly four years.

The Registry Error That Changed Everything

The turning point came when a paralegal working for one of the defendant companies pulled the original 1994 application file and noticed something odd. The description used to identify the trademarked color was so vague — referencing a color range rather than a specific Pantone designation — that it could theoretically be interpreted to cover a substantial portion of the visible orange spectrum.

In other words, if the trademark held, the company might have a legitimate legal claim over a color range broad enough to affect products in industries that had nothing to do with packaging foam.

This got people's attention.

The USPTO quietly reopened its review of the original registration. The reexamination found that the approval had been granted in error — the examiner had misclassified the application type, which had triggered a different (and less rigorous) review standard than the claim actually warranted.

The trademark was narrowed dramatically. What had briefly been an enforceable claim over a wide shade of orange became a much more limited registration, applicable only to the company's specific product line under specific commercial conditions.

Why This Keeps Happening

The foam company story isn't unique. It's one of dozens of cases where intellectual property law — a system genuinely struggling to keep pace with the creative ways humans find to claim ownership of things — has produced outcomes that seem almost satirical.

Ownership of specific colors has been claimed, disputed, and litigated across industries ranging from pharmaceuticals (where the color of a pill capsule has been trademarked) to construction equipment (Deere's particular shade of green is registered) to fast food (there's ongoing tension in the industry over certain combinations of red and yellow).

Most of these claims are deliberate and legally defensible. But some — like the foam company's orange — start with a paperwork error and end up in federal court, reshaping an industry's color palette because a checkbox got ticked wrong in 1994.

The Fringe Takeaway

Intellectual property law is one of those areas where the rules are precise enough to produce absurd outcomes. When the system works as intended, it protects genuine innovation. When it hiccups — when an examiner misreads an application, or a description is drafted too broadly, or a filing deadline gets missed — the results can be strange enough to make you question whether the whole apparatus is held together with staples and optimism.

Someone once accidentally owned a color. The government approved it. It took four years and two federal lawsuits to sort out.

The foam, for what it's worth, is still orange.