Protecting your brand name before you spend money marketing it

Here is a situation we see often. A business registers its company name, trades under it for two years, invests in packaging, signage and a following, then receives a letter from someone holding a registered trade mark for a similar name in the same class.

The response is always the same: but we registered the name. The difficulty is that company registration and trade mark registration are not the same thing.

What each one does

Company or business name registration establishes your entity and lets you trade under that name. It is about corporate identity.

Trade mark registration is about the market. It gives you rights in a name or logo for particular classes of goods and services, and it is what you rely on to stop someone using a confusingly similar mark in your space.

You can hold one without the other, and many businesses only discover the gap when it becomes a problem.

Search before you commit

Before you invest in a name, before packaging, signage, domains and social handles, check whether it is available and whether anything similar is registered in your classes. A search early costs a fraction of a rebrand later.

Classes matter

Trade marks are registered against classes of goods and services. Protection in one class does not automatically extend to others. If you sell a product now and plan to add a service line, consider that at filing stage rather than after launch.

Descriptive names are weak names

Names that plainly describe what you sell are harder to register and harder to enforce, because other traders need those words too. Distinctive or invented names are easier to protect. This is a commercial trade-off worth making with open eyes.

Use it, and keep the evidence

Trade mark rights are connected to use. Keep dated evidence of how and when you have used the mark: packaging, advertising, invoices, screenshots. Straightforward to gather as you go, awkward to reconstruct years later.

The contract trap

A great deal of intellectual property is lost not through infringement but through ordinary agreements. If a freelancer designed your logo or an agency wrote your content, ownership depends entirely on what the contract said. Without a written assignment, you may hold less than you think.