Design Patent Pending -Rights for an applicant

Unfortunately, you do not have many rights when your patent application is pending - patent rights only attach when the patent issues. However, you can certainly advertise/promote your product with a "patent pending" notification on it which effectively gives the world notice that a patent application is pending and that if/when the patent issues, they may infringe your patent. This also plays a role against those who willingly keep using the potentially infringing design once the patent issues because they were in fact already on notice that a patent could issue and yet they continued to use their product which could very well likely infringe your design when/if the patent issues.

With all due respect to Limor, pending design applications are not published.