Trade Marking a UK Clothing Brand Before You Print It
By The Velocity Wear Team
Naming is where most new clothing brands accidentally build on ground they do not own. The sequence is entirely reasonable at every step: choose a name you love, buy the domain, take the Instagram handle, design the logo, order production. And then a letter arrives from a company that registered something confusingly similar in class 25 four years ago.
The whole problem is preventable with an afternoon of searching before you spend anything.
Class 25 is your class
UK trade marks are registered against classes of goods and services, and class 25 is clothing, footwear and headgear. A business holding your exact name in an unrelated class is usually not your problem. A business holding something similar in class 25 very much is.
Note "similar", not "identical". A different spelling of the same-sounding word is not a workaround, and neither is bolting "clothing" or "apparel" on the end. The question is whether the public would be confused, and the public does not read carefully.
Search before you commit
- 1Search the UK IPO trade mark database for your name and obvious variants, filtered to class 25. It is free and takes minutes.
- 2Search for unregistered use — a business trading under the name without registration can still have rights through use, which in the UK is a real and enforceable thing.
- 3Search Companies House, the domain registries, Instagram and the app stores. An unregistered but active brand is a practical obstacle even where it is not a legal one.
- 4Check the other markets you plan to sell into. A UK registration protects you in the UK; the EU, the US and Canada are separate systems with separate registers.
Word mark first
A word mark protects the name however it is set, which is almost always what a clothing brand actually wants — your wordmark will appear in different typefaces on different products for years, and a mark tied to one specific logo protects less than founders assume.
A figurative mark protecting a specific logo is worth having too, eventually. If you can only do one now, do the word.
Why the production run sets the deadline
Your name goes on the neck label, the hang tag, the packaging and into every product photograph you will take. Labels are manufactured during the production run rather than added afterwards, which means the name is effectively locked at artwork approval — considerably earlier than most founders realise.
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.
The opposition period
A UK application is examined and then published for a period during which existing rights holders can oppose it. That means registration is not instant, and a mark can be challenged after you have filed and before you are registered.
Which is an argument for filing early rather than late. A pending application with a filing date is a stronger position than nothing at all, and it is visible to anybody else running the same search you should have run.
When to get help
The searching is something you can and should do yourself, before spending money on anything else. The filing itself — deciding the specification, the classes and the mark type — is where a trade mark attorney earns their fee, because a badly drafted specification protects less than you think it does.
Do the free part first. It is the part that saves the production run.
