A nearly $24 million trademark judgment tends to get attention. But Van Leeuwen Ice Cream LLC v. Rebel Creamery LLC is quickly becoming an equally interesting lesson in what happens after the plaintiff wins.
On July 16, 2026, U.S. District Judge Eric R. Komitee of the Eastern District of New York found Rebel Creamery liable for infringing Van Leeuwen’s ice cream packaging trade dress under the Lanham Act, as well as for trade dress infringement, unfair competition, and dilution under New York law. The court permanently enjoined Rebel from continuing to sell products with confusingly similar packaging, ordered Rebel to redesign its pints, and awarded Van Leeuwen $23.785 million of Rebel’s profits.
That is a significant win by any measure.
Less than a month later, however, the story changed. Rebel filed a notice of appeal on August 12. Two days later, on August 14, it filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Utah. The bankruptcy now raises a separate—and very practical—question: How much of that $23.785 million will Van Leeuwen actually recover?
First, a word about the $23.8 million “damages” award
Although the case is understandably being described as a $23.8 million trademark damages award, that description is not quite precise.
Van Leeuwen did not receive $23.785 million as compensation for its own lost sales. The award was an accounting and disgorgement of Rebel’s profits under Section 1117(a) of the Lanham Act. This is an important distinction.
The case involved Van Leeuwen’s familiar pint design: monochromatic cardboard pints with matching lids, primarily pastel colors, prominent black script lettering, and an overall minimalist appearance. The court found that combination sufficiently definite, distinctive, and nonfunctional to constitute protectable trade dress.
The evidence on confusion was unusually strong for a packaging case. The court pointed to consumer confusion, grocery-store employees mixing the products and shelf labels, and survey evidence showing a 34.3% net confusion rate. The court also made an unusually strong bad-faith finding, concluding that the testimony about how Rebel developed its packaging was fabricated and that the similarity was not coincidental.
Those findings became particularly important at the remedies stage.
Van Leeuwen sought $36.4 million in Rebel profits. After resolving a dispute concerning Rebel’s deductible expenses, the court arrived at approximately $35.5 million in profits. But it did not award that full amount.
Instead, Judge Komitee reduced the profits figure by 33%. The court recognized that at least part of Rebel’s success came from something other than its packaging—namely, consumer demand for keto and “better-for-you” ice cream. Rebel’s own market research showed that 33% of its customer base had previously purchased only better-for-you ice creams. The court used that evidence as the basis for an equitable reduction, resulting in the $23.785 million award.
Then came Chapter 11
Rebel’s bankruptcy filing changes the collection landscape considerably.
Rebel filed Chapter 11 in Utah as In re Rebel Creamery LLC, Case No. 2:26-bk-25006. Its petition estimated both assets and liabilities in the $10 million to $50 million range and indicated that funds would be available for unsecured creditors. Reporting based on the bankruptcy schedules puts Rebel’s assets at approximately $13.78 million and liabilities at approximately $23.85 million. Those reported assets include approximately $5.22 million in cash and cash equivalents, $2.59 million in receivables, and $5.65 million in inventory.
The most striking number, however, is Van Leeuwen’s claim.
Rebel has scheduled the $23.785 million judgment as a disputed unsecured claim and noted that the judgment is on appeal. According to the initial reporting on the schedules, the Van Leeuwen judgment represents nearly all of Rebel’s fixed unsecured liabilities.
That does not mean Van Leeuwen will receive most of Rebel’s $13.78 million in reported assets. Bankruptcy math is not that simple. Book value is not necessarily liquidation value, secured creditors may have claims against particular assets, and administrative and priority claims can be paid ahead of general unsecured creditors.
But the numbers illustrate the problem: on the face of the initial schedules, the judgment is substantially larger than Rebel’s reported asset base.
What happens to Van Leeuwen’s judgment now?
The first immediate effect is straightforward: Van Leeuwen cannot simply start collecting the judgment.
Section 362 of the Bankruptcy Code automatically stays, among other things, enforcement of a prepetition judgment and acts to collect a prepetition claim. So, at least for now, Van Leeuwen has gone from holding a readily enforceable federal judgment to holding a judgment claim that Rebel has scheduled as disputed and that must now be dealt with through the Chapter 11 process.
I can say from extensive personal experience, scoops melt fast in the summer.
The injunction may ultimately matter as much as the money
Another piece of the judgment should not get lost amid the $23.785 million headline: the injunction.
Judge Komitee ordered Rebel to stop selling products with trade dress likely to be confused with Van Leeuwen’s and to redesign its packaging to create a substantially different commercial impression.
Bankruptcy can restructure prepetition monetary obligations, but it does not give a business a license to engage in new infringement going forward. At the same time, the injunction itself was entered before the Chapter 11 filing, and efforts to enforce a prepetition judgment or continue proceedings against the debtor can implicate the automatic stay. The scope of the stay therefore may have to be addressed before Van Leeuwen takes particular steps to enforce the existing injunction. That does not make new postpetition infringement permissible; it means the bankruptcy overlay matters to the procedural route for enforcing rights arising from the prepetition judgment.
Suffice it to say that to the extent Rebel continues operating—which is generally the objective in Chapter 11—the packaging issue still has to be addressed.
For Van Leeuwen, that means the litigation victory has value beyond whatever distribution it ultimately receives on the monetary judgment. Van Leeuwen obtained a judicial determination validating its trade dress and an injunction aimed at preventing continued marketplace confusion.
Depending on what happens in the bankruptcy, that may prove to be a more durable part of the victory than the dollar figure.
Final bite:
Trademark litigation sometimes focuses so heavily on liability and damages that collectability feels like a problem for another day. Van Leeuwen v. Rebel is a reminder that the financial condition of the defendant is part of the remedies analysis in the real world, even if it is not part of proving infringement.
Van Leeuwen won an impressive judgment. It proved protectable trade dress, actual confusion, bad faith, and intentional infringement. It obtained an injunction. And it persuaded the court to disgorge nearly $24 million of Rebel’s profits.
The takeaway is that a judgment is to cash just as fresh cow’s milk is to two scoops from the freezer. A lot has to happen.
The next chapter of Van Leeuwen v. Rebel will be written largely in bankruptcy court, and it may provide just as useful a lesson for brand owners as the trademark decision itself: winning the case and monetizing the win are two different things.
