Wearables

The Pants Have a Particular Part To Play

A shoe company with 143 patents about soles filed two on the same day for a piece of running shorts, and the timing tells you why.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of a trouser detail with a pocket and belt loop.

What changes in this design

A reader looking at an ordinary clothing description might expect details about material, construction, or use.

Instead, this record stays with the picture. It shows a lower outline that spreads outward, paired angular upper panels, a central dashed line, a rounded rectangular outline near the top, and dashed outer lines.

That matters because it keeps the reader focused on what is actually visible. The drawing gives shape and proportion, while leaving material, construction, and performance unanswered.

A flask, a phone, and nowhere to put them

I read a lot of running gear reviews last month, and one complaint kept surfacing. Shorts with storage built in either bounce, or sag, or hold a gel but not a phone, or pair a decent liner with pockets too short to be useful. One reviewer worked through the whole category before landing on a pair he thought finally got it right: mesh pockets around the whole waist, snap buttons, front and back pockets sized for 500 to 600 ml flasks, no bounce on uneven ground.

Those shorts come from Janji, a small brand. The baseline he measured everyone against belonged to a large yoga-wear company. That is the world this filing sits inside: a dull problem, unsolved for years by outfits with very large budgets.

143 filings about soles, then two about pants

Search the US patent database for On Clouds GmbH, the Swiss entity behind the running-shoe brand On, and 143 matches come back. The first page is all one subject. A sole with horizontal and vertical damping. A midsole with cushioning struts. A midsole with a foamed three-dimensional lattice structure. A shoe with dual lace. It is a sole record, the paper trail of a company that makes one thing and thinks hard about it.

Then, on 8 November 2024, two design applications arrived with consecutive serial numbers, 29/972,290 and 29/972,291. Both titled Part of Pants. Same assignee, seven figures each, one claim each. The first issued in March 2026. The second issued on 11 August 2026 as D1,140,504, which is the one I went looking at.

A title that names only a part

The title reads like somebody gave up drafting it. It isn't that. A design application gets exactly one claim, phrased as the ornamental design for a named article, as shown and described. The title has to designate that article and cannot claim more than the solid lines do, and broken lines in the drawings show surrounding structure that forms no part of what is protected. Naming a part rather than a whole garment follows from claiming a piece of something.

The classification says more than the title does. A41D27/20 covers pockets. A41B9/02 covers drawers or underpants. Together they put the claimed design at the pocketed inner liner rather than the outer shell. The pocket scheme also has finer codes available - one for pockets made to hold phones and electronics, one for closures, one for waterproof. None were applied. The generic parent was. So nothing here supports calling this a phone pocket, or a secure one.

Six months after the obviousness test collapsed

On 21 May 2024, about six months before these applications were filed, the full Federal Circuit decided LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Technology Operations and discarded the test that had governed design patent obviousness for decades. The old rule made invalidation hard: a challenger needed a primary reference basically the same as the claimed design. The court called that improperly rigid and swapped in the flexible four-factor analysis used for ordinary patents.

Firm alerts at the time warned of a wider range of invalidation arguments and substantial uncertainty for owners. The court also left open what counts as related prior art, which is precisely the question a small detail on a common garment turns on. One defensive suggestion in those alerts was to keep filing multiple embodiments of varying scope for each design. Two same-day applications for the same article have that shape.

The harder half of the problem

Scale is worth holding onto. Design patent number one million issued in September 2023, for a dispensing comb. Number 1,140,504 issued in August 2026 - about 140,000 numbers in under three years, roughly 4,100 a month. The examiner on the twin filing worked through around 49 references to allow it, including designs held by the largest athletic brands and product listings going back to 2018.

The commercial reason is plain. Apparel sales grew 68.2% in 2025 to CHF 169.9 million, accessories grew 124.1%, and together they reached 7.0% of net sales, about one dollar in fourteen. A design patent runs fifteen years from grant, so this one holds to roughly August 2041. The 21 months it spent in examination cost no protection at the end, though the design sat exposed for all of them.

Here is my position. Owning the drawing is the easy half. The claim covers how a thing looks, not whether it carries a flask on broken ground without sagging, and the runner writing about who solved that never mentioned this company once. A patent register records ambition accurately and performance not at all. The harder half is being the pair somebody reaches for on a Tuesday morning.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

The record, briefly. USD1140504S1, “Part of Pants” The checked public record identifies a U.S. design patent titled 'Part of Pants'. The reading treats the published title and figure as a visual starting point and does not infer a material, mechanism, or performance claim not established there.

More angles on this

A Glove With a PortfolioAnother reading from the same A41D classification family, outerwear; protective garments; accessories.
The Jacket Is Not Just Passing ThroughAnother reading from the same A41D classification family, outerwear; protective garments; accessories.
CPC A41D: Outerwear; protective garments; accessoriesThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
CPC A41B: Shirts; underwear; baby linen; handkerchiefsThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
The Suspender Belt Is Holding the Plot TogetherAnother reading from the neighbouring A41F classification family, garment fastenings; suspenders.

Read around this one:Public patent record USPTO published figure Patent issue-date index