Trademark Relinquished After Backlash From Trademark Bullying A Decade Ago By Pho Restaurant

It’s that time of the year in the Midwest, when the skies darken early and the temperature drops. And that means it’s pho season. As a lover of pho, allow me to educate anyone that hasn’t heard of it. It’s a soup of sorts, with rice noodles, spices, and meat. And it’s considered the national dish of Vietnam, where pho originated.

Lots of people love pho, including Stephen Wall and Juliette Wall of the UK, who traveled to Vietnam decades ago and then opened up a chain of pho restaurants back home. They also trademarked the name of their business somehow, which is merely named “Pho”. This would be roughly the equivalent of an American company trademarking “Hot Dogs”. What’s worse, back in 2013, the company bullied another restaurant, Mo Pho, into changing its name, citing that same trademark.

It’s a debate that roots back to 2013, when a small southeast London restaurant called Mo Pho said it had received a legal letter from Pho Holdings requesting it changes its name. Pho Holdings said it had trademarked the word ‘pho’ six years prior, a time when knowledge of the soup dish was limited in the UK, meaning only they could use the term in the title of a restaurant business.

Despite the chain claiming that it had not trademarked the Vietnamese dish, just the company name to protect business, outrage formed on social media, with one likening the decision to trademarking ‘sandwich and not letting others use it’. The brand later admitted to making a mistake and tweeted that they had dropped the dispute against the now-permanently closed Mo Pho, according to The Guardian.

Sure, Pho Holdings admitted a mistake in going after a competitor wielding an overly broad and generic trademark, particularly given the cultural appropriation aspect of it all. But it sure didn’t change its own brand name, nor relinquish its trademark. To date, Pho Holdings still operates its “Pho” chain of restaurants.

But then a Vietnamese influencer in London came across the chain and the story of that trademark bullying attempt from a decade ago and decided to use the internet to turn it into a full on freaking thing.

Fast forward to this month, and a London-based influencer with Vietnamese heritage reopened the discussion with a scathing TikTok, which gained over two million views.

Yen, who goes by @iamyenlikethemoney on the platform, said: ‘So, as a Vietnamese person, every single time I walk past this restaurant, it makes my blood boil because not only is this restaurant white owned…but they trademarked the word pho in the UK’.

She explained how the chain had contacted other businesses using the term in their name, saying: ‘Do you know how insane that is? That is like trademarking the word fish and chips, kebab, or sushi… it is so generic’.

Those two million views resulted in public calls to boycott the chain, along with online criticism of Pho Holdings for playing the trademark bully. For its part, Pho Holdings has pointed out that it hasn’t since gone after other restaurants purely for having “Pho” in their names, nor have any lawsuits been filed. That didn’t help all that much, as it turns out. Enough people understood that the root of the problem here was the existence of the generic trademark.

And due to all of that public pressure, Pho Holdings finally took material action.

A Pho spokesperson said: ‘We have always loved the Vietnamese food and culture that Pho has been inspired by and have been listening to the comments from the past week.

‘We understand the concerns that have been raised and have today filed a request to the Intellectual Property Office to surrender our registered trademark on the use of ‘pho’.’

So, the lesson here isn’t merely that public pressure on intellectual property matters can be effective. Instead, it’s that the public is capable of having a long memory on this sort of thing. Far too often we see trademark bullying attempted and then rescinded after a backlash, with too many companies presuming that backing down is all it will take to make the backlash go away.

In this case at least, the public has shown it can hold bullies to account, even a decade later.