On March 31, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a ruling in the Nike v. lululemon athletic shoe patent infringement dispute: Judge Arun Subramanian invalidated the claims of Nike’s patent at issue and overturned the jury’s previous verdict finding lululemon liable for infringement and ordering it to pay approximately $355,000 (about 2.45 million RMB) in damages.

The case centered on Nike’s Flyknit knitted upper technology. Nike asserted that its U.S. Patent No. 8,266,749 protects a technical solution for forming an upper structure through a specific knitting method. This solution achieves a differentiated distribution of support and elasticity across different areas of a single-layer knitted material, thereby enhancing the upper’s fit and athletic performance. Based on this, Nike alleged that lululemon’s Chargefeel, Strongfeel, and Blissfeel series of athletic shoes utilized the same or substantially the same knitted structure and manufacturing approach, constituting patent infringement.

In March 2025, the jury found that certain lululemon products fell within the scope of the patent claims and constituted infringement, ordering the company to pay approximately $355,450 in damages. Subsequently, lululemon filed a post-verdict motion with the court, requesting that the judge overturn the verdict and rule on the validity of the patent.

In this ruling, the court held that the technical concept claimed by the patent—namely, “achieving different performance characteristics in different areas of the shoe upper through knitting”—could have been derived from prior art before the patent application was filed. It was a solution that a person of ordinary skill in the art could have arrived at through conventional combinations, rather than a truly groundbreaking innovation. In other words, the patent merely combined known knitting methods with the concept of functional zoning and did not constitute a sufficiently novel technical contribution. Accordingly, the court determined that the prerequisites for establishing infringement were absent, and the jury’s prior finding of infringement could not stand.