A man opens a coffee roastery in Leeds under a name he has been thinking about for two years. He incorporates, the name goes through Companies House without a murmur, he buys the domain, and he spends about £4,000 on a fascia, cups, bags, a van wrap and a website.
Eleven weeks later a solicitor's letter arrives from a company in Bristol that registered the same word as a trade mark for coffee in 2019. He has to change everything. The £4,000 is gone, the reviews that mention the old name are stranded, and the customers who found him by searching for it cannot any more.
Nobody misled him. Companies House did exactly what Companies House does, which is not what he thought it did.
The register is a list of companies, not a list of rights
When you incorporate, Companies House checks whether the proposed name is the same as an existing name on the index, applying rules that disregard certain punctuation and common words, and it checks for sensitive or prohibited words that need permission, such as those implying a connection with government or a regulated activity.
That is the whole check. It does not search the trade mark register. It does not consider whether a business three counties away has been trading under a similar name for a decade. It does not consider similar names at all, only identical ones under its matching rules.
So a company name tells you that no other company has the same name. It gives you no positive right to use that name as a brand, and it is no defence to an infringement claim.
There is a narrow protection running the other way. If someone registers a company name that is the same as, or sufficiently similar to, a name in which you have goodwill, and did so opportunistically, you can complain to the Company Names Tribunal under the Companies Act 2006. The tribunal can order the name to be changed. It deals with name-squatting, not with ordinary brand disputes.
Trading names sit outside all of this. A company can trade under a different name, subject to the disclosure rules in the Companies Act requiring the company's registered name and office address to appear on business letters, order forms and its website. Trading as a name gives you no registered right either.
A registered trade mark is the thing that actually protects you
Trade marks are registered at the Intellectual Property Office under the Trade Marks Act 1994. A registration gives you an exclusive right to use the mark for the goods and services you registered it for, and the ability to stop others using an identical or confusingly similar mark for identical or similar goods and services.
The application is made online. The basic fee has been £170 for one class, with an additional fee for each further class, and there is a Right Start option that splits the payment so you pay part up front and the rest only if the examination goes well. Fees are set by the IPO and reviewed, so check the current schedule.
Classes are the part people misunderstand. Goods and services are divided into forty-five classes under the Nice Classification. Coffee beans, a café serving coffee, and coffee-branded clothing sit in three different classes. Registering in one gives you nothing in the others, and registering in all forty-five is not permitted because you must have a genuine intention to use the mark for what you claim.
Pick the classes you actually trade in, plus any you have a real plan for within the next few years. A registration can be revoked for non-use if the mark has not been genuinely used for the goods or services covered for a continuous period of five years, so a defensive registration across the whole classification decays rather than protects.
Not everything can be registered. A mark must be capable of distinguishing your goods or services. Purely descriptive terms, generic words for the product, and laudatory terms are refused. Calling a bakery The Bread Shop is unregistrable for bread, which is not a technicality: a name that cannot be protected is a name that any competitor can use.
The IPO examines the application and, if it passes, publishes it in the trade marks journal for a two month opposition period, extendable to three. During that window anyone with earlier rights can oppose. Importantly, the IPO will notify owners of earlier similar marks that your application has been published, which is why a clash you did not find in your own search tends to find you. Registration lasts ten years and is renewable indefinitely in ten year blocks.
Passing off is the fallback, and it is a poor one
Without a registration, you are left with the common law action of passing off. It requires three things, from the formulation in Reckitt and Colman v Borden: goodwill attached to your goods or services in the mind of the purchasing public, a misrepresentation by the defendant likely to lead the public to believe their goods or services are yours, and damage resulting.
Every one of those has to be proved with evidence. Goodwill means witness statements, advertising spend, turnover figures, press coverage and survey evidence about what customers actually think. It is geographically limited, so goodwill in Leeds may not help you in Southampton. It is expensive and slow, and it starts from a position where you have to establish a right rather than point at a certificate.
A registered trade mark inverts that. You produce the registration, the question becomes whether the other party's use falls within it, and most disputes end with a letter rather than a claim.
Note also that the ® symbol may only be used with a registered mark. Falsely representing a mark as registered is an offence under section 95 of the Trade Marks Act 1994. The ™ symbol has no legal meaning and can be used on an unregistered mark to signal a claim.
The search happens before the sign writer
An hour of searching before you commit is the cheapest hour in the whole exercise. Do it in this order, and do it before you order anything printed.
- Search the IPO trade mark database for your word and for anything that sounds or looks close, in the classes you would be trading in and in adjacent ones.
- Search the Companies House register, including dissolved companies, and search the equivalent register in Ireland if you trade across the border.
- Search plainly on the web, on the major social platforms, and on the domain registrars, for the exact name and for close variants.
- Check whether an EU or international registration designates the UK, because rights held elsewhere can extend here.
If anything comes back close, take advice from a trade mark attorney before spending. An attorney's clearance search costs a few hundred pounds and covers similarity and phonetic equivalents in a way a keyword search does not. Against £4,000 of signage and a rebrand, it is not an expensive precaution.
One more sequencing point. File the application before you launch publicly, not after. The register operates on a first to file basis for priority purposes, and announcing a name before you have filed it is an invitation.
Where this shows up in the game
Business Baron treats your name as an asset you build value into rather than a label you type once. Brand trust accumulates across competence, integrity and care, and it is attached to a name that a competitor may already have rights in. Choose carelessly and you can be forced to rebrand years in, which means paying for signage again and starting part of your reputation from scratch. Naming a business badly in the game costs you nothing but a restart.