Attractive Women Are Literate

A very, very valuable lesson was learned on the Bookish side of the internet over the past week or so, as a somewhat popular (but relatively unknown) online merch store called “Allie Rose Co” announced that they had successfully trademarked the term “Hot Girls Read.” If you’ve been around on Bookish spaces for any length of time, you’ll understand why this course of action seems a little absurd but in case you need some context: it’s absurd because Allie Rose Co did not coin the phrase “Hot Girls Read” and has literally no reason to hold that trademark. BookTok, that is Book TikTok, exploded with the controversy with very, very few people rising to defend Allie’s decision not only to trademark a term that by all rights belongs to the collective “bookosphere” (I’ll ™ that one maybe) but also her “peace and love” post which was ostensibly her attempt at enforcement.

Allie Mitrovich, a 26 year old entrepreneur who focuses on stickers, apparel, and other stationery such as bookmarks, posted on her instagram story on June 3rd with a celebratory tone:

Hot Girls Read™ is officially ours & 3ish years ago after I started reading more consistently and finally started to love to read, I put HGR on some bookmarks and crews and the rest is freaking history!!! In the least corny way possible that lil phrase changed my life and changed the entire course of my business in a way I neeeever saw coming. I love that because of those 3 words a lot of you found me and I love talking about books with you :-) this ™ is for the freaking girls

It's only right to celebrate with a big ole HGR drop!! The biggest mockneck drop ever is coming next Tuesday at 7pm est. I'd love to celebrate with you because this is thanks to you all

Little did Allie know that this phrase, which had seemingly launched her brand into relevancy, was also going to serve as the weapon by which it would be dismantled. Claiming that she had created the term in 2021 in her trademark filings, it has actually been utilized far longer, first seen in the wild on Twitter in 2009 and then having been popularized by rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 hit “Hot Girl Summer” and her subsequent usage of the phrase “Hot Girl Shit.” From then on, “Hot Girls ____” has been a very common template for all kinds of merch and it’s honestly completely unreasonable to think that any of them ought to be trademarked by any single entity. The thing about trademarks is that in order to keep them, you must defend them which can be a costly endeavor and is usually the kind of thing you do with your brand name, something that Allie Rose Co has neglected to do, by the way. Yikes. So when Allie insisted later that she wasn’t intending on threatening other small businesses or sending out cease and desists, people weren’t really buying it. After all, she had already put out a statement that folks who have merch that matched her trademark should take them down and cease selling them, staking her “claim” to the phrase very publicly to a disgruntled audience.

I’ve seen HGR on lots of items from other business’ that follow me so if that is you please remove those listings from ur site as soon as possible 💛 with love !!!!

It was the “with love” at the end that boiled the blood for most of the girlies as it seemed Allie was rubbing their noses in the fact that she had snatched up the trademark before anyone else had thought to do so despite that trademarks should not be commonly-utilized phrases already ubiquitously present among retailers. And it wasn’t as though Allie was ignorant to the backlash. She made the conscious choice to disable comments across several social media platforms and placed her TikTok Shop on “vacation mode” after her former followers and fans pointed out that she was selling unlicensed merchandise featuring several book titles and series that were not her intellectual property. She strategically deleted the posts that had announced the trademark and those that encouraged others to remove their own Hot Girls Read™ (yes, I think I will put the symbol there forever to commemorate this era) merchandise, but there was a very telling silence from her for a few days that had Bookish spaces twittering with thoughts and takes theorizing what might happen next.

Fortunately for everyone, but especially for Allie Rose Co, the next move was the best one Allie could have taken. She put out a very plain video with no crying explaining where she was coming from when she did it, how she acknowledged that it was a human-driven mistake, and that the trademark was already in the process of being surrendered and abandoned. Any messages that were sent on behalf of Allie insisting on people removing their merchandise was done without her go-ahead or approval and did not come from anyone with official recognition. Her Hot Girls Read™ merch was still up on her site but the profits from those sales are being donated to two charities based on reading. Her very frank video ends without fanfare as she states that she values community over her business and leaves it at that, ending a week-long drama that had allowed Bookish spaces to consolidate under one banner if only for a few days to agree on one thing.

I am hoping, naturally, that this was a lesson for more than just Allie Rose Co. To anyone who is watching this happen or reading about it later: do not be trademarking common phrases. It’s called “discernment” and it is extremely important in certain scenarios, this being one of those. Not only was this a waste of Allie’s money (trademarks are not free), it was a disastrous business decision that has left Allie with far less community support than she had previously. As TikTokker Maddy Agers stated “Community trust is not an asset that you can just pull from without maintaining and fostering [it].” It’s going to take a long time before Allie is able to build her audience back up and let the ever-flowing sands of time wear away her transgression. It can happen and I hope it will. One mistake like this shouldn’t sink an entire business. I’m certainly holding out hope for growth.

As a little snotty side note though: this girl got “into” reading only three years ago and then made a business around it? I’m sorry, that’s kinda shady. Reading is famously a community built around a very delicate balance between money economy and gift economy. If she hasn’t been part of the gift economy first, no wonder she’s trying to trademark nonsense. Girl needs to get into fanfiction before she starts making more of these dumb little mistakes.

Alright. That’s it. Allie—don’t fuck up again.