The USPTO Just Refused MARLBORO MAN Again — 180 People Have Tried This and 13 Made It

On July 21, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused an application to register MARLBORO MAN for cigars. It was the second refusal for the same applicant, an individual named Abram Harris, whose filing had already gone abandoned once for a missed deadline and been revived in May.

The examiner cited Philip Morris, whose core MARLBORO registration was filed in 1907 and is still live today — 119 years of continuous rights.

Harris never had a chance, and the register can tell you exactly how little of one. Between 2010 and 2022, 180 individuals filed to trademark a word already owned by a household brand — Barbie, Google, Ferrari, Marlboro, Chanel and two dozen others.

Thirteen succeeded. That's a 7.2% success rate, against 55.5% for individual applicants filing anything else. Reaching for a famous word costs roughly forty-eight percentage points of probability, which is about as close as the register gets to a posted price.

But the thirteen who made it are the interesting part. Eight of them had the brand word inside their own legal name.

The list

Look at who actually got through.

TONY FERRARI, filed by Anthony Ferrari. FERRARI'S PIZZERIA, filed by Vincent Ferrari Jr. FERRARI CHOCOLATE, filed by Caesar Ferrari. DINO FERRARI, filed by Dorina Hauer Dino. LIZZY CHANEL, filed by Chanel Wright. PAP CHANEL, filed by Jaida Chanel Roby. AGATHA RUIZ DE LA PRADA, filed by Agatha Ruiz de la Prada de Sentmenat.

There's a pattern you could state as a rule: on this register, the reliable way to register a famous word is to have been born with it.

That isn't a loophole. It reflects how the law actually works — trademark rights turn on whether consumers would be confused about who's behind a product, and a pizzeria run by a man named Ferrari, sold in his neighborhood, isn't likely to be mistaken for a supercar manufacturer. Distance between the goods matters, and so does the honest use of your own name.

The rest of the winners are mostly performers registering stage names for entertainment services — a category where a person's name is the product.

Then there's the one who was simply early

The thirteenth winner is TIKTOK, registered by an individual named Dorian Banks.

He filed it in March 2012 — four years before ByteDance launched the app that made the word famous. He wasn't reaching for a famous brand. He picked two syllables that happened to become one of the most valuable names on earth.

His registration was later cancelled, for the most ordinary reason on the register: the maintenance paperwork proving continued use wasn't completed. He held the word and let it go before it was worth anything.

The walls

For some brands, the individual success rate isn't low. It's zero.

Across that same twelve-year window, individuals filed 53 applications containing BARBIE. None registered. GOOGLE: eighteen filings, zero registrations. FACEBOOK: fifteen, zero. Gucci, Instagram, iPhone, Netflix and Versace all show the same result — people tried, nobody got through.

These are what a trademark lawyer means by a strong mark. They're coined or arbitrary words with no ordinary meaning, owned by companies that watch the register continuously and object early. There is no clever angle into them.

What happens to the ones who try anyway

Which brings us back to the case that started this.

In April 2025, an individual named Abram Harris filed MARLBORO MAN for cigars and cigar boxes. The USPTO refused it, citing Philip Morris, whose core MARLBORO registration was filed in 1907 and is still live today — 119 years of continuous rights. The file then went abandoned for a missed deadline, was revived, and drew another refusal in July 2026.

Look for company he might have had. Across the entire register, only 40 live records contain the word MARLBORO, and Philip Morris owns 30 of them. In the whole 2010–2022 window, exactly two other individuals genuinely tried: one filed MARLBORO-ECIGARETTE in 2011, another SAVE MARLBORO COLLEGE! in 2020.

Both died the identical way Harris's application nearly did — abandoned for failure to respond to the examiner in time. Not defeated on the merits. Abandoned, because answering a refusal takes work and money that most solo applicants stop spending once the first letter arrives.

That's the quiet shape of the whole category. These applications don't usually get killed in a dramatic fight with a famous brand's lawyers. They stop because the applicant stops.

What a founder should take from this

A famous word is not an available word, and "different products" rarely saves you. Harris filed for cigars, not cigarettes. Different goods, adjacent market, same dominant term — refused anyway. The distance between your product and theirs has to be genuinely large, and "adjacent industry" is not large.

The exception proves the rule. If your own name happens to be Ferrari or Chanel, you have a real and legitimate argument — and even then the winners here registered narrow things: a pizzeria, a chocolate line, a stage name. Nobody registered a car.

Check for the wall before you spend anything. Fifty-three people filed something containing BARBIE and not one registered. That outcome was knowable from the register before any of them paid a filing fee. The question to ask isn't "is this name taken?" — it's "has anyone in my position ever gotten this through?" The register answers that, and it answers it for free.

The refusal letter is where most people quit, and quitting is a choice. Both of the other Marlboro hopefuls abandoned by silence rather than losing an argument. If a name is worth filing for, it's worth answering the first letter about. If it isn't worth answering for, it probably wasn't worth filing.

This analysis is based on public USPTO records and is not legal advice. Cohort: US applications filed January 1, 2010 through December 31, 2022 whose mark text contains, as a whole word, one of thirty coined or arbitrary famous brand names; individual-applicant baseline drawn from all US applications filed in the same window by individual owners.