Skort skirmish: Popflex CEO fights for lavender activewear made famous by Taylor Swift

Ask the Taylor Swift fan in your life and chances are they know about the lavender Popflex skort (a portmanteau of skirt and shorts). The Eras Tour star wore the clothing item in her "For a fortnight challenge" YouTube video posted on April 19. The clip has been viewed, globally, 122 million times.

Cassey Ho, the CEO of oGorgeous Inc. — the parent company of Popflex — had no idea Swift had purchased her athleisure items. The blogger expressed her jubilance in an Instagram reel.

"YOU MADE MY WILDEST DREAM COME TRUE TONIGHT AND I WILL NEVER EVER EVER FORGET," she wrote in the caption.

"I've never sent anything to Taylor's team," she says in a video call from Austin, Texas. "It's this 0.3 second clip where she's wearing the pirouette skort. ... Our sales went wild."

Interest skyrocketed with more than 16,000 preorders pouring in for the $60 skort, a 1,661% rise in sales, according to Ho.

Swift loved the skort enough to mention it in the first line of her "Tortured Poets" track "imgonnagetyouback": "Lilac short skirt / the one that fits me like skin." Four months later, the superstar wore the same Popflex skort in her music video for "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart," time marker 2:03.

"It's insane," Ho says.

'But what you did was just as dark'

The sales may have flowed like wind in Popflex's sails, but a dark side of the rapid success reared its head in the form of fashion facsimiles.

Ho says that in 2023 Shein, the global e-commerce clothing store, copied a handful of her designs. In the court of social media, the CEO's army of fans — 3.1 million followers on Instagram, 3.7 million on TikTok and 10.6 million on YouTube — cried foul in Shein's posts. The daughter of the U.S. Shein president, George Chiao, saw one of the videos and told her dad. He reached out to Ho to make it right.

"It's not just Shein," Ho says. "After that, it's been Amazon, TikTok Shop, Alibaba. Last year alone, we took down 499 dupes, 393 of which were the pirouette skort."

Ho applied for an expedited patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. An examiner approved the application in January 2024.

The USPTO has issued more than 500 design patents for skirt-related items over the past decade including the Popflex pirouette skort. Ho’s current protection will last until 2039.

Protecting Popflex

oGorgeous owns six patents that have assisted Ho's legal team as they send hundreds of cease and desist letters to companies (something Swift's legal team is familiar with). A recent letter made its way to Gottex Studio in New York City for a purple skirt deemed suspicious.

"They have the same shapes of the little end caps," Ho says, holding her skort and the Gottex Studio one. "There's this little bar tack that keeps the drawstring from falling out in the wash. They placed the logo in the same exact spot where I placed mine."

The sportswear may have been removed from the competitor's website and social media, but a charged video posted by Ho sent shockwaves through her fandom.

"HELP. I'm being silenced," the TikTok video reads in red text.

The manufacturer for Gottex Studio, BKF Industries Corp., tells USA TODAY it tried to negotiate the matter confidentially and is "working with oGorgeous Inc.'s attorneys to resolve the matter."

Ho says these types of skirt skirmishes occupy a large chunk of her time. With successful products come battles over territory in the fashion industry. She draws parallels to Swift who fights similar feuds in the music sector.

"I look up to Taylor as a businesswoman so much and the way she creatively battles through her storytelling and through her music," she says. "I want her to know that this is happening, and hopefully I can make some power moves like she has done."

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Follow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.