Registering a Clothing Trade Mark in Canada
By The Velocity Wear Team
Naming is the enjoyable part of starting a brand and it is where a great many clothing businesses build on ground they do not own. The sequence is entirely reasonable at each step — choose a name, take the domain, take the handle, design the logo, order production — and then a letter arrives from a business that registered something confusingly similar years ago.
It is preventable with an afternoon of searching before you commit money to anything.
Class 25 and the Canadian system
Canadian trade marks are administered by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Applications specify goods and services under the Nice classification, and class 25 is clothing, footwear and headgear.
A business holding your name in an unrelated class is generally not your problem. One holding something confusingly similar in class 25 is a direct obstacle, and note that the test is confusion rather than identity — a different spelling of the same-sounding word is not a workaround, and neither is adding "apparel" to the end.
Rights can exist without registration
Canada, like the UK, recognises rights arising from use. A business trading under a name without ever registering it can still have enforceable rights in the area where it has built a reputation.
That means the register is a necessary search and not a sufficient one. Check trading businesses, corporate registries, domains and social handles too — an unregistered but active brand is a practical obstacle even where the legal position is arguable.
The search, in order
- 1The CIPO trade mark database, for your name and obvious variants, focused on class 25.
- 2Federal and provincial corporate name registries, since a company operating under the name may hold rights through use.
- 3A plain web and social search, because a brand with a following and no registration is still going to be a problem in practice.
- 4The registers in any other market you plan to sell into. Canadian, US, UK and EU rights are separate systems, and a US expansion built on a name somebody else owns there is an expensive discovery.
Why production sets the deadline
Your brand name goes into the neck label, onto the hang tag, into the packaging and through every photograph you will take. Labels are made during the production run, not applied afterwards, so the name is effectively locked at artwork approval.
Changing a name after a run means new labels, new tags, new photography, and a stack of garments carrying a mark you have been asked to stop using. Search before you send artwork, not before you launch.
Word mark before design mark
A word mark protects the name however it is set, which is nearly always what a clothing brand actually wants — your name will appear in different typefaces on different products for years. A design mark protects a specific logo and protects less than founders assume.
Most brands eventually want both. If you are doing one first, do the word.
Where to spend money
The searching costs nothing and is the part that saves the production run. The filing — deciding the specification, the classes and the mark type — is where a trade mark agent earns their fee, because a poorly drafted specification protects narrower than you intended and you find out at the worst moment.
Do the free part first, and do it before the artwork goes anywhere.
