Stone Creek v. Omnia: When Knowledge Destroys Good Faith
By Casey Scott McKay ·
In Stone Creek, Inc. v. Omnia Italian Design, Inc., 875 F.3d 426 (9th Cir. 2017), the Ninth Circuit answered a question the Supreme Court had left open since 1918: a junior user's mere knowledge of a senior user's mark destroys the "good faith" the Tea Rose-Rectanus defense requires. The infringer was Stone Creek's own Italian manufacturing partner, which rebuilt the STONE CREEK logo pixel by pixel and sold matching furniture to a Midwestern department-store chain for five years. This article traces the doctrine from its 1916 and 1918 Supreme Court origins through Stone Creek and the live circuit split it sharpened, explains how the Lanham Act's constructive-notice and constructive-use rules interact with common-law territory, and unpacks the remedies twist the Supreme Court later abrogated in Romag Fasteners v. Fossil (2020). It closes with fresh worked examples, a forum-by-forum map, a litigation and prevention playbook, an FAQ, and cross-links to related Rightsy resources. Written for founders, litigators, judges, and curious readers alike.
Intellectual Property -> Trademark | Published 28 June 2026 | rightsy.io
The first sign of trouble was a phone call that should never have happened.
A shopper in Wisconsin had bought a leather recliner from a Bon-Ton department store. Something needed servicing, so she did the sensible thing and called the number printed on the warranty card. That number rang a furniture showroom in Phoenix, Arizona, more than seventeen hundred miles away, run by a company called Stone Creek. The people who answered had a problem: they had never built that recliner. They had never shipped a single sofa to Wisconsin. They had never heard of the store that sold it. And yet there was the customer, holding a warranty card with the Stone Creek name, the Stone Creek logo, and the Stone Creek phone number, asking about a chair Stone Creek had never touched.
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