MAC's Chinese Name Just Cost a C-Beauty Brand 60M Yuan

"Because of one oversight, I lost 60 million yuan. The team broke up. The brand went to zero overnight. The company is hanging by a thread."

That is Ying Yani (应娅妮), founder of Chinese makeup brand Tangmeike (唐魅可), in a video that went round China's hot search lists this month.

The oversight was two characters sitting in the middle of her own brand name: 魅可, Meike. Which happens to be what MAC is called in Chinese.

What happened

Ying posted the video on October 13. By October 21 the story was trending on Baidu under a headline that translates as "viral Chinese brand forced to rename, loses 60 million."

MAC, owned by Estée Lauder, filed to invalidate Tangmeike's trademark. Its argument was simple enough: 唐魅可 contains 魅可 whole, and for cosmetics, face wash, lipstick and fragrance that is too close.

The trademark office agreed. Several of the brand's related marks were declared invalid for those core goods.

Tangmeike is now 唐魅, Tangmei, trading in English as TOMMARK.

Ying's accounting of the damage: packaging and promotional materials scrapped, inventory stuck in warehouses, staff leaving, and consumer recognition of the name she had spent years building reset to roughly nothing.

Why the number is so big

Tangmeike was a real hit, which is the whole problem.

It broke out on a matcha mousse cushion. By mid-2024 it had done 1.5 billion yuan in cumulative sales and opened more than 3,000 offline stores. Chinese coverage puts its cushions alone at around 150 million yuan in 2023, and credits a December 2022 appearance in Li Jiaqi's livestream with topping Tmall's BB cream category that day.

Five years of livestreams, shopfronts and repeat customers, all of it depositing value into two characters that belonged to somebody else.

The better the brand did, the more expensive the mistake got.

The slow fade before the video

The crisis did not arrive the week Ying filmed herself. It had been running for about two years, visible in public filings, and nobody was watching.

Chinese reporting traced the product registration record. The last big batch of filings under 唐魅可 came in late 2024, around the time of the ruling. Then six months of nothing from a company that had been filing almost monthly. From July 2025 the new products went in under a different name. The platform stores on Tmall, Douyin, Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu were quietly relabelled. The new Chinese mark came through in August 2026.

Two years of a company backing away from its own name in plain sight.

MAC is not the only one doing this

Western beauty has got noticeably more aggressive in China this year, per China Business News.

Aesop sued seven companies connected to Chinese brand AMAXY on October 15, and included the factory. Shiseido sued Aldi China and its manufacturer in September over a 24.9-yuan primer it says copies a CPB product selling at 540. And MAC took the name off Tangmeike.

One beauty executive quoted in that coverage named the shift that matters. Brands have started going after the factories as well as the sellers. "Once that path works, dupes may disappear at the source."

The same pattern is running outside beauty. Tea chain Molly Tea (茉莉奶白) lost a first-instance ruling over a four-petal flower logo and was ordered to pay 10.3 million yuan. Feminine care brand ALFFANY (艾芙尼) has faced repeated trademark challenges over a name that reads a lot like Tiffany.

The thing nobody tells founders

Chinese commentary on this case kept returning to one point, and it is the one most foreign brands get wrong too.

Holding a registered trademark in China gets you to the starting line and no further. You can own the certificate and still lose the mark, if somebody with an earlier right comes after you.

Underneath that sits the structural fact that explains this entire story. China runs a first-to-file trademark system. Whoever registers first generally owns the mark, whatever anybody was calling themselves elsewhere, and however long they had been doing it.

MAC won because MAC had filed 魅可 and used it. Tangmeike lost because it built a 1.5 billion yuan business on characters it had never truly owned.

What to do before somebody does it to you

1. Find out what Chinese consumers call you, then check whether you own it.

Most Western brands have a Chinese name they never chose. Shoppers invented it, Xiaohongshu adopted it, and it is now what people type into Tmall search.

Spend an afternoon searching your brand on Xiaohongshu, Douyin and Tmall and write down every Chinese rendering you see. Then have a China IP firm run those against the trademark register.

If a name with real consumer traction is unregistered, or worse, registered to somebody else, that is the most urgent item on your China list and it is not close.

2. If somebody already holds it, you have three options and a clock.

This is the situation most brands find themselves in, and the panic response is usually to rename. Slow down.

You can try to buy it, which is often cheaper and faster than it sounds, particularly from a squatter with no business. You can challenge it, and Chinese law allows cancellation of a mark that has gone three consecutive years without genuine use, which catches a lot of squatters sitting on inventory they never traded. Or you rename, which is the Tangmeike outcome and the expensive one.

Work out which of the three applies before anybody books a rebrand.

3. Register defensively, the way Chinese brands do.

Covering your core class is the bare floor. Chinese companies routinely file the name, close variants, homophone characters that sound the same, the pinyin, and the nickname consumers use, across neighbouring classes.

It feels excessive until you price it against 60 million yuan. A Chinese trademark filing runs a few hundred yuan per class per mark. The asymmetry here is absurd and almost nobody acts on it.

4. Put a watch on the register and act on the alerts.

Have your IP firm flag new filings containing your name in Chinese, English or pinyin. The service is cheap.

The part brands skip is the response. Decide now who reviews those alerts, who decides whether to oppose, and the budget they can authorise without convening a committee. Opposition windows in China are short, and an alert nobody reads is just a subscription you pay for.

5. Look down your own supply chain before somebody else does.

Aesop and Shiseido both named manufacturers in their filings this year, which opens a front most brands have never thought about.

Ask your China suppliers directly what else they produce, and put a clause in the contract preventing them from making lookalikes of your product for anyone else. If your factory is pressing someone else's dupe on the next line, you will find out when a lawyer does.