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💙 Are you wondering when to trademark your handmade business? Tune in as we break down the ins and outs of trademarking. From what a trademark is, how to trademark your business, understanding the importance of protecting your brand, and more. 

🚀 We've got you covered, including the pros and cons of trademarking your handmade business.  We'll help you answer the question 'is it worth trademarking my handmade business?'

💡 Don't miss out on this episode packed with valuable insights to help safeguard your handmade business identity.

Welcome back to the Handmade Bosses blog where we help handmade business owners who sell online on platforms like Etsy and their own website scale and grow their business.

Today, I'm gonna be talking about trademarking... basically a type of intellectual property.

You might have seen people on Etsy get intellectual property notices, and this means they are in violation of a trademarked name, logo, concept, basically anything that that person has essentially trademarked. 

One of the main benefits for handmade business owners is you can put the little copyright, the little R symbol after your business name and anything else that you trademark. Telling everyone … it belongs to you.

Whats the difference between intellectual property and copyright?

Intellectual property is different from copyright. And by the way, I'm not a legal expert. This is just what I have found out on my journey of trademarking my own handmade business names, concept names, all that kind of stuff.

Copyright, you will have to check at what level, but usually arises automatically within the UK. That might not be the case in the USA. You should check this with legal bodies and legal experts. 

A trademark must be officially registered, within the UK you do this by going to the UK Intellectual Property Office. You might see it referred to as the UKIPO. They run through a check to make sure that what you're trying to trademark isn't too similar or exactly the same as a trademark that someone else has. And then they will either accept it or reject it.

Do I have to trademark my business?

There are no legal obligations for you to trademark your handmade business. It is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, especially right at the beginning. It does, though, enable some powerful legal protection, because as you guys may know yourselves, or you may have had experience with, is that copyright can be quite hard to prove.

With copywriting there's all sorts of documents often needed, dates, times, proof that you have the concept before the person copying you, or maybe you need to prove that you haven't copied someone else. It can be quite a laborious task to go through and really make sure that you're proving things. Whereas with a trademark, you have so much more protection and it's legal protection as well.

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What are the benefits to trademarking my handmade business?

If you trademark your business name, you will be the sole entity entitled to trade under that name. So there's a lot of legal benefits, which is the main reason why I decided to trademark not only my business name, but also the challenges that we run and some of the concepts as well, such as the Listathon and Sellathon. 

The big benefit is it stops people from using your business name or anything too similar to it.

Now, the nuances of this are kind of a bit lost on me in terms of how similar, but this is definitely something that the UK IPO office can help you with if you’re in the UK. 

It's really a case of, if another business has a name very similar to yours and you trademark your name, you might be able to essentially say, hey, I own the trademark to this. You can't use something too similar. It really helps people to easily identify your brand. 

Let’s take Starbucks, as an example. It’s copyrighted and trademarked. Imagine someone came up with a coffee shop name called Starbucks. Starbucks could quite easily enforce that and say, hey, that's not going to happen.

We don't want to have confusion with the brand, with the people that are expecting to go on to Starbucks' website, or visit one of their cafes. It enforces this level of brand equity that you have when you have some kind of trademark.

The impact on your handmade business value

One other massive plus point is that it effectively increases your business' value because you've really gone through its trademark.

No one else can use that name. It’s like having a house with a massive back garden that you're wanting to sell. It's gonna have a bigger increased value if you've already got planning permission to build something in the back garden, right?

Because you've already gone through the whole process of actually getting that done. So it does increase your business' value, and it does really make it look attractive if you were ever to sell it.

Now, the downsides of trademarking is that there is a lot of...

For me, when I trademarked handmade bosses and the challenges, I wanted to make sure that I'm the only person that can run the listathon, the sellathon, the postathon, all those kinds of things. I started to get a lot of junk mail, because a lot of people went on the IPO database, found my registered address, and started to send me junk mail. Luckily, I've got a PO box to keep my actual address private..

A lot of junk mail was quite scary, telling me falsely my trademark had been breached, and it turns out that right at the bottom in small print, it's sent from some weird fake office office.

It was really easy but took a lot of time, it took me about three to four months because they have to make sure that they are checking things over, contacting anyone whose name is similar, and give them a chance to get back to them to say, yes, that's fine or no.

It's probably not worth doing if you are not gonna use the trademark. If you are thinking of starting a business, this is your five to 10-year plan, you're gonna operate under the business name, then I would say, yeah, fine. 

But no one has that level of assurance from themselves that they're always gonna stick with that name. They are never gonna change it. If you do, you’ll have to do another trademark, another bunch of classes, and wait another three months. Only go through the process if you are sticking with your business name. 

The other downside is if someone takes issue with your trademark, now this could be that there's different types of trademarks, trademarking words, trademark logo, trademark like marks, imagery, or that kind of thing.

There are different classes of trademarking too such as name, colours or logo. This can cause issues if you create your logo on a site such as Canva. You can't trademark the logo, but you can trademark the business name.You could have someone that has a different business name to you, but that has the same logo because you both created it on Canva, in which case, if you don't have a logo trademark, then that might present an issue with confusion. 

I just trademarked my business name. I can't be bothered with the whole, don't use my brand colours, because I'm already ahead of them. So if they're going to copy me, whatever. 

I have had people who have been in my challenges, in the course, even someone who's worked with me one on one, who has eventually decided to start coaching. And it's like, okay, there are some conflicts of interest there. And that is where copyright is a totally different thing, especially if it’s in the same niche. Luckily, I have legal advisors around me.

When you're trademarking, it can attract attention from other businesses. For example, you try to register Sturbox, again, let's go with Starbucks, they’ll get a notification to say, hey, someone's trying to trademark a name that's really similar to yours.

That brings the name to the attention of businesses who can potentially submit to having it rejected because it's too similar to theirs 

I also think it's really nice as well to be able to have that little R after your business name. I think it does command a level of authority, and it does kind of say, I stand by my business 100%.

If you have a name, which is a real household name, so for example, Etsy, someone will go to Etsy because they know the Etsy name, they know the Etsy logo, they know what Etsy is gonna look like, they trust the brand, then yes, of course, that does make commercial sense to trademark the name because people have trust in that brand. 

If maybe people don't really mind about the name, you're still in the early stages of figuring things out, you're not really sure whether you're gonna stick with it in terms of naming or even the business as a whole, then I would say no, it doesn't really work.

Also, don't assume that just by buying the domain address and name, you’ve protected your brand name because you haven't. Businesses can still use the same name, colours as you, etc. 

Trademarking does put copycats off, especially those who aren't too legally versed in what happens if you start to copy a name logo with a little R symbol. They see that and they go, okay, they mean business. I'm not gonna copy things. But again, it doesn't really extend to things like products.

If you want to trademark every product you have, it'll be very expensive because you have to do a separate IPO submission every single time.

Another thing to consider is if it is your name, so let's say it is stephcolelewis.com, the chances of another business wanting to use that name is very slim.

What does it cost to trademark my handmade business?

You also can trademark stuff yourself. I found the whole process really, really easy. I went to the government website on the intellectual property office, the IPO database, and I basically looked up myself.

You will have to register within classes, and depending on how many classes you have, depends on the price you pay. From memory, it starts from between £150 - £200 to trademark a business name, and the classes can be things like handmade business, jewellery business, candle maker.And depending on the amount of classes that you want/need protection under depends on the price..

If you want to trademark everything across the board, every single class, which to be honest, you probably won't need to, it's gonna cost you a lot in terms of costs because you're gonna have to pay more per class.

From memory, I think it was about £50 per extra class. And I think to trademark handmade bosses, it cost me about £250 and I did it all myself…yey, go me !

So the question …  is it worth trademarking your business name?

Well, yes and no. There are a number of pros and cons to it. I decided to do it in my business because I wanted to protect the business name, the handmade bosses name.

I also wanted to protect the challenges and events we run. As handmade bosses get bigger, there are more and more copycats cropping up. A quite a big name within my niche literally bought my book and created courses and content based on paragraphs and content from the book.

Trademarking is just the top level. And it is a bit of a minefield, but rest assured that a trademark does give you that next level up of some kind of protection. Unfortunately, it won't stop copycats if they really want to.

That is pretty much up to you in terms of how you're gonna deal with it. Cease and desist, court letter, actually taking them to court. A lot of these things I've actually had to do and looking at the copycats now, I probably will have to do.

But again, trademarking does just offer you that extra level of protection and value. 

I hope you've enjoyed this blog all about trademarking your handmade business.

Love Steph xox

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