The ‘Hot Girl’ Trademark Wars Are Here — Don’t Get Burned

By Brad Harrigan, Harrigan IP

When Megan Thee Stallion dropped “Hot Girl Summer” in August 2019, she handed the internet a phrasing template it has never let go of. The song hit No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, and “hot girl” became the prefix for everything — hot girl walk, hot girls read, hot girls have tummy issues, you name it.

Scroll TikTok or Instagram for thirty seconds and you’ll find the formula stamped on shirts, hats, stickers, and bookmarks in thousands of small shops. Which is exactly why a recent hot girl trademark dispute blew up online. One shop tried to claim a slice of the trend for itself, and the bookish corner of the internet pushed back hard.

What actually happened with ‘Hot Girls Read’

On June 3, an online business called Allie Rose Co. — a shop selling stickers, bookmarks, apparel, and accessories since 2020 — announced it had successfully registered the phrase “Hot Girls Read” for goods including bookmarks, stickers, notebooks, notepads, sweatshirts, and t-shirts.

The owner, Allie Mitrovitch, posted the news to Instagram and described how she’d put “HGR” on bookmarks and crewnecks years earlier, saying the phrase “changed the entire course of my business.” Fair enough — building a brand around a phrase you love is a real thing.

The trouble started with the next part. In an Instagram story, she acknowledged that other small businesses sell merchandise with the same phrase and asked them to “please remove those listings from ur site as soon as possible … with love !!!!”

That request did not land softly. Customers and the broader online bookish community were upset that a phrase plenty of creators had used for years was suddenly being treated as one shop’s property. A fantasy and romance author, writing in a Substack post, pointed out that the phrase isn’t tied to any single creator and shared screenshots of people using it as far back as 2009.

The backlash worked. Mitrovitch surrendered the registration and posted a video apologizing for the harm to other small business owners. (You can read the original write-up at Moneywise.)

So can you even trademark a phrase like this?

Here’s where the law gets interesting, because the answer is “sometimes, but it’s complicated.” A trademark — a word, phrase, or symbol that identifies the source of your goods — has to do one job: tell buyers your stuff comes from you and not the shop next door.

A phrase that’s floating freely across the entire internet has a hard time doing that job. When millions of people slap “hot girls read” on tote bags as a vibe rather than a brand, it functions as decoration or a slogan, not as a source identifier. The USPTO calls that an ornamental or failure-to-function problem, and it sinks a lot of viral-phrase applications.

Even when a registration does issue, it doesn’t hand you ownership of the English language. A trademark covers specific goods and services in specific international classes. And the weaker and more common the phrase, the narrower and shakier the rights. This is the whole reason we tell clients to pick a strong, distinctive trademark instead of a trendy phrase everyone is already using.

What this means for your business

If you build your brand on a phrase pulled straight from the cultural water supply, you are building on rented land. Three things can go wrong, and the Hot Girls Read saga shows all of them.

First, your registration may be vulnerable. A third party can file a letter of protest while your application is pending, or later try to cancel a registration that never should have issued. A mark on a phrase everyone uses is a fat target.

Second, the enforcement letters you send may backfire. When you demand that dozens of small shops pull their listings over a phrase with a long public history, you may not have the rights to back it up — and the reputational cost can be brutal. Knowing the difference between a real infringement claim and an overreach is exactly why we counsel clients before they ever fire off a cease-and-desist.

Third, and this is the one that stings the most: you can spend real money chasing a registration you ultimately have to surrender. That’s the worst of both worlds — costs up front, public criticism on the back end, and nothing to show for it.

Search first, then file

The cleanest way to avoid all of this is the boring one: do the homework before you commit your brand and your money. A thorough clearance search tells you whether a phrase is already crowded with users, whether someone else has a prior claim, and whether your proposed mark is even capable of functioning as a trademark in the first place.

That search is also how you decide whether a phrase is worth building on at all. If “hot girls read” turns up on a thousand Etsy listings and a 2009 forum post, that’s your signal to either pivot to something distinctive or accept that you’ll be coexisting with a crowd — not policing it.

Filing early matters too, but early only helps when the mark is actually protectable and reasonably clear. Racing to register a meme everyone shares isn’t a head start; it’s a head start into a wall. Pair an honest clearance search with a smart filing strategy and you get rights you can actually defend.

The hot girl trademark fight will not be the last one. Every viral phrase eventually tempts someone into trying to fence it off, and every time, the internet notices. Be the business that built on solid ground instead of the one that had to post the apology video.

Thinking about trademarking a phrase or building a brand around a trend? Talk to us before you file — a quick conversation can save you a costly, embarrassing dispute. Start with a flat-fee trademark registration, and if you want to protect what’s yours going forward, our trademark monitoring service keeps an eye on new filings that could step on your brand. Curious how the rules work for trendy phrases? Read our guide on whether you can trademark a viral phrase.