Cartoon stick figure holding a backpack in one hand and a stylized bag with a repeating “S” mark in the other hand – representing a blog post about the Serapian Stepan repeating pattern mark trademark registration.

Trademark: Serapian Stepan

First Used: 1977

First Registered: 1988

Current Owner: STEFANO SERAPIAN S.R.L. [1]

Trademark Type: non-traditional trademark; trade dress; repeating pattern mark

Primarily Associated With: travelling bags [2]

Brief (and likely incomplete) History [3]:

The Serapian Stepan repeating pattern mark is an important piece of trademark history – it is one of the oldest, still active repeating pattern mark registration in the US (second only to the Cambrelle Pique repeating pattern mark)!

Serapian was founded in Milan, Italy in 1928 by Stefano Serapian, an Armenian-born craftsman who had fled conflict with his younger brother in the early 1920s. The company did not begin as a grand luxury empire. Stefano started by making fine leather goods himself and cycling around Milan to sell them, slowly building a reputation piece by piece. Along the way he met Gina Flori, who became his first business partner and later his wife, and together they helped turn Serapian into one of Milan’s standout leather houses. By the 1950s and 1960s, the Serapian brand had become part of the city’s post-war design boom, attracting an international crowd with its bespoke creations and colorful, high-craft style.

Sadly, Stefano passed away in the early 1970s, leaving charge of the company to his son Ardavast. At a pivotal moment, he decided not to play it safe but to push the brand and company forward with something new. Enter the Stepan brand, a lightweight, water-resistant coated canvas named after Stefano’s Armenian name and finished with a small etched “S” pattern across a chessboard-like grid. It was built for stylish travel and quickly became a favorite of sophisticated globetrotters, prized for looking polished while standing up to real use. Decades later, the Serapian Stepan S design mark [4] and the Serapian Stepan repeating pattern mark [5] are still instantly recognizable as a Serapian brand favorite.