The Costly Truth of Trademarks

Many people want to secure a trademark, but hardly ever do it correctly. As they don’t understand the level of protection you actually need. Trademarks are highly complex and it is almost always recommended that you hire a professional to file them for you. I’ll explain why.

The biggest mistake most people make, is filing a single class. Trademarks have multiple different classes, which essentially are just categories that you can protect. So, here is our scenarios. You have a brand that provides goods and services, you have a brand name, brand logo, and brand colors to protect. In order to fully protect your brand, you would need to file a trademark for the brand name as plain text, then your brand logo (even if it’s just text, you would need to protect that particular font style), when it comes to the colors, you should never file a specific color, always file in black and white, then all of the colors in the universe are protected. If you file for a specific color, then only that specific color is protected.

So, now that we know that. Let’s move into the brand name and brand logo. For both of these trademarks you will need to have multiple categories, such as apparel, phone cases, usb drives, marketing tools, online advertisement, brochures, jackets, glasses, hats, etc. You have to get very, very specific when it comes to trademarks and what you want to protect. This is where the cost starts to add up and if you file something incorrectly, you have to resubmit after fixing your mistakes, thats why it’s important to use a trademark professional, typically a lawyer to file this complex piece of intellectual property for you. Each category that you want to protect is an additional charge. This is why people say, trademarks are for the rich. In addition, you are only protected in the countries that you file in. So if you want to be protected in both the United States and Canada, then you must file in both countries, essentially doubling your cost. Then if you want protection in other parts of the world, your cost of course increases.

Far too many times, I see a brand that filed for a trademark and only files in one class with one mark. Meaning they filed a brand name trademark with the class of, let’s say, t-shirt. This in my opinion is a huge waste of time and money. You are a better off not filing anything and just taking your chances until you can actually afford to file correctly. This is because, you only protected your brand name for a t-shirt. You did not protect the logo nor any other class or even item of clothing, a t-shirt doesn’t cover hoodies, joggers etc. So technically, someone could take your logo still and put it on a t-shirt and you can’t do anything about it. Why? Because remember, you only filed a brand name trademark with no claim to any font style design. Essentially, even the merchandise you are making isn’t even protected, because you aren’t using just plain text on your merchandise. If someone wanted to go and use your brand name with any old font style, lets say, on a phone case, then they can and you can’t do anything about it, because you only protected a t-shirt.

If you think you got a deal by filing your own trademark at face value, you played yourself. Even if you file yourself, your cost of filing a trademark should near the $1,000 range at the very least. This means you actually protected multiple classes and are giving yourself a flexible level of protection. Each class for a United States trademark is $225-$275.

I have heard of trademarks costing upwards of $10,000 just for the United States filings. Now add other countries and you’re price goes up even more. Being in North America, I would highly recommend protecting in the United States and Canada at the very least, in my experience. Then don’t forget, your trademarks must be renewed every 10 years. So it is a reoccurring expense.

Below are screenshots of some of the trademarks that Nike has filed and total filings of Nike, Universal Music Group, and Def Jam.

This is one of Nikes more recent trademarks. Covering their online store, and retail stores.

This is Nikes protecting things like cellphone cases, goggles (notice how it says, “goggles for sports; ski goggles; snow goggles;. You have to get very specific.), activity data, hand-held computing devices etc.

This is a trademark protecting the Vapor line. They covered t-shirts, tank-tops etc. because the Nike trademark for t-shirts would not cover a Vapor t-shirt.

Below are the number of trademark filings each of the brands have. Nike, Universal Music, and Def Jam. These are just the trademark filings not the actual specific items covered which is a much larger number.

All of these screenshots are taken from USPTO website. It is a public knowledge website that you can search all current pattens and trademarks. This is how people are able to predict new products, such as Apple products, these filings must be done months in advance, thus leaving room for predictions.