Five Minute Friday: Trademarking Your Business

Foreign. Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hi, it's you and me, five minute Friday. This is going to be so short and sweet and hopefully you are like, okay girl, I've got this. I've done this already, but if not, I wanted to mention it to you. Have you trademarked your business yet? Have you done it? It should be one of the very first things that you do if you are serious about building a business that lasts. Now there's a lot of confusion around trademarking. What does it mean? We could get into the weeds. It's also a very quick Google search. Essentially it is this. If you protect your name, your business name, your logo, your slogan, whatever, someone down the street can't come in and name their business name the exact same as yours, claim it across social media and pretend that they're you or even pretend they're not you. But just create a ton of confusion with your customers. So trademarking is a really important first step to your business. Now when you get into the process of trademarking, couple quick things that you should do maybe in order of priority here. First is I want to make sure when you've chosen your business name or even if you've been in business for a while, you do a great detailed Google search on who else has a business name similar to you. If you are, I'll say the Flossy Peach, my friend Macy's business and you start googling and there's already numerous other Flossy Peaches, well, you start to question is it worth trademarking? It needs to be a unique name. So I would say make sure you are one of the first people to use this name. The issue is whoever is the first to trademark this business name can force takedowns of the other people who have not yet trademarked that name. So if the name already exists, a number of people have it, it doesn't really do you a ton of good because they could actually come after you for using that exact same name. So make sure in your own naming that you've been unique. You've got something that stands out. It's a little bit different than the rest or Just know that if maybe there's one person that's very similar to you and was using it first, that you don't have the right to go after that business and force them to stop using the name. Hope that makes sense. So advanced Google searches, search across all social media channels, make sure that name isn't in use and then I would be smart. If you are serious about trademarking and protecting your name, go by all the domains that are related to this name. Go download, or I guess it's not download, but save. Claim all of the social media handles that are related to that name. And the next time someone announces there's some new popular social media channel, even if you don't plan to get on it right away, it's smart to go and claim your name before somebody else does. Right? So be advanced about it. I'll tell you one big mistake that I made and this doesn't have anything to do with trademarking, but it's more on domain names. When I started the Boutique Hub, I was so broke I bought the boutique hub.com I didn't buy Boutique Hub stupid. Like I should have gotten both and I only got one. If I could go back and do that over again, I would. Now they want like $10,000 for me to buy that domain name and I'm not going to do it. So instead I focused on trademarking my name so that if somebody came in and was trying to replicate my likeness, replicate this brand, I could do a takedown that way. So of course I've trademarked the Boutique Hub, the Boutique Summit, the Boutique Boss Planner, Boutique Boss. All, all of these different things that we've used throughout the years are all protected names so someone can't come in and replicate so that Google search is first and most important. The second place you're going to go search is USTPO.gov the US Trademark and Patent Office. This is where all the trademarks are stored. So if you were ever worried about someone who has a name similar to yours or something that you're researching, maybe it is. You've gotten yourself in a bit of a pickle because you thought you should carry Kansas City Chiefs gear and realized all of its trademarked and you shouldn't be carrying any of it unless it's officially licensed and you need to go research the trademark. You can find that on ustpo.gov so that's where you want to go research what existing trademarks are out there. Now the third step in the process is when you go to place a trademark and Buy a trademark. You can choose from a number of classifications, register your trademark in. So let's say you could register it in goods and services. Like I'm gonna have T shirts with my trademark printed on them. Like, that's one class. You might be registering a trademark in a class related to music, or you might be registering it in a class related to, let's say, a non profit. There's a number of different classes. So you want to do the research just to know which classes am I going to register my trademark in? We had, when we registered the mark, Boutique Boss, we had an attorney from the company, Hugo Boss, reach out to us because they were like, boutique Boss, Hugo Boss. It's using the word boss. It's too similar. So we had to come to an agreement about which classifications we were going to use and exactly how we were going to present our mark and how we weren't going to present our mark because it would be infringing on their mark. So something very interesting to note is once you go ahead and file your trademark, other people can be searching, searching for that new filing and maybe have like an alert set up on their computer, let's say like a Google alert, that someone new has registered a mark that's similar to theirs. And that's just a, you know, a trigger for the attorneys that do this for a living. So just be aware, be smart about where you're going to file and then choose those classifications. Now the final step is to actually do the filing. And this is not a huge, overwhelming process, I promise. We have some amazing attorneys in the Boutique Hub that specialize this in this. And we vetted them. We know they work on trademarks every single day. Angie Turner is a great one. If you're a member of the Boutique Hub and you go to your service provider directory, you'll find her information there as well. Now if you don't want to go the attorney route and you're like, I think I can DIY this because it's really not that tough. I did my first couple of trademarks on LegalZoom. And I want to say it cost. It depends on how many classes you register it in because it costs money per class. But I want to say between like 500 to $700 roughly is what the registration cost. And then you do have to come back, I believe it's every five years, and renew that trademark again. So just a couple of things to note before you get started, but I highly encourage you when you are new to business and you're just trying to like, get this thing to float, right? Like you're just trying to make it happen. This tends to be one of the last things we think about, which is what happened to me with the Boutique Hub, right? But then once you get going and you get some momentum, you're like, ooh, I'm gonna be here for a while, right? I'm in it for the long run. And before someone comes in and steps on your toes and takes your name and then forces you to quit using your name and you completely have to rebrand, the investment you make of 500 to 700 to protect yourself is going to be far smarter than the expense it is going to be for you to completely go through a rebrand, lose customers in the process and create a lot of brand confusion. So set yourself up right from the start by trademarking your name. That's it for today's five Minute Friday, guys. I hope this was helpful. Please leave the show a rating and review. Please subscribe if you haven't already. And if you would love to hear more or just continue the conversation, follow me over at AJ Alderson on Instagram. I would love to hear from you guys. All right, that's it. Have a great rest of your week. We will talk to you guys soon. Thanks for listening, guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.