Hi all, just looking for some advice on Trade marking a clothing brand.
We own a clothing brand that we want to launch soon, with a four letter brand name. Let's just call it FOUR for example. We own www.fourstore.com to operate under, with matching socials, but with the brand visuals, story and so on firmly sitting at FOUR.
But for our trademark, I notice in class 25 (clothing class), there are a few already coexisting registered marks in there with the same name.
A musician has an alter ego that that they use under the name, for releasing merch including t-shirts. Although, they have 4-5 alter egos and their main brand is their full name which they primarily operate under. Additionally, their shop has a FOUR section, but no products available.
A globally operating clothing and accessories brand has a line of shoe products named "FOUR", but only their parent brand name is used on the actual shoes. They use the FOUR name only as a model name on their site and so on, not physically. They sall all sorts of clothes, shoes and accessories, but only this shoe line uses the brand name we have too.
There's a small uk based niche construction industry brand with one safety wearable item that for some reason has the name we want on them. This is just an accessory, not their company brand name or on any of their other products. But it is a wearable item and it does feature the name, although as FO.UR.
Then there's around 3 or so other registered marks with variations of our name like FO . UR, FO.UR or FO-UR.
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So, as a full on clothing brand for us coming into this, would we be hard pressed applying for this name in this class?
Should we add a second word to our brand name, we own a good .com in this scenario, and then focus on trying to build on that first name within it and try to secure the sole word as the brand over time?
I appreciate this is a long post and also it may be hard to say for anyone without seeing specific brands/registrations, but would love to hear from anyone knowledgeable in this area or who has gone through this process too!