Registering a brand name can mean two different things. It can be either incorporating your company or registering your trade mark, which would be your brand. The latter is the more common understanding of the sentence ‘registering your brand’.
How do you register your brand?
If by this you mean you are looking to incorporate your company, then you need to visit the Companies House website and follow the process online to form your company. You can use company formation services if you are not comfortable with completing the process yourself. We’d recommend our friends Company Incorporations if you need help with this process.
On the other hand if you want to register your trade mark, then you would have to go through the following steps:
- Identify what it is that you want to trade mark. Is it your name, your logo, your slogan or anything unique about your service or product.
- Search to see if your trade mark is available. A trade mark has to be unique and original. Registering a trade mark gives you monopoly over its use in relation to specific goods and services. If an identical or similar trade mark exists, it is possible that you may have difficulty in registering it. To find out if your trade mark is available you can conduct a trade mark search in the relevant countries register.
- Research and understand the classes you will have to file your trade mark under. Trade mark are registered under classes, which identify specific goods and services. You can learn more about trade mark classes in our post here.
- Once you have gone through the above, you should file the trade mark application with the appropriate organisation. Trade marks are territorial so they need to be filed with the relevant countries trade mark offices.
The trade mark process is more complex than incorporating a company. The process can take a few months to complete. In the UK, the trade mark process can last between 4 to 6 months. If you are not comfortable with going through the process yourself, we can help you register your trade mark through one of the three affordable packages that we offer.
If you haven’t yet started your company then registering your brand would be both incorporating your company and getting your trade mark registered. If you have a company, then it would be registering your trade mark.
