The four questions
- Is the exact name registered? The office search answers this — for one office.
- Is a similar spelling registered? “Luminna” vs “Lumina”. Offices refuse and owners oppose on similarity.
- Does a registered mark sound the same? “Kwik” vs “Quick”. Spoken confusion counts.
- Is it registered somewhere else you sell? Free at USPTO, taken at EUIPO — common for sellers on both Amazon.com and Amazon.de.
Doing it by hand
USPTO’s search, EUIPO’s eSearch, UKIPO’s search, WIPO’s Global Brand Database, then the national offices for every other market. Each with its own syntax; similarity searches on some, none on others. For a seller with three markets and a shortlist of five names, that is an afternoon — and it still misses sound-alikes.
Doing it once
Type the name into the brand name search. TM Atlas runs exact, prefix, word-contains, look-alike, sound-alike and transliterated matching across 54.2 million marks in 85 registers and scores each hit for your goods and territories. Under a second.
Then:
- Search the name with your product word (“Lumina candles”) — that is what will be on the listing.
- Search the obvious variants: plural, one letter off, phonetic spelling.
- Set classes to your goods and territories to your markets; the score sharpens.
Reading what comes back
For each mark: owner, register, status, filing date, classes, and a score with reasons. A HIGH REVIEW on a live mark in your goods means pick another name — the cheapest moment to do so is now. A REVIEW means read the mark and decide. LOW means nothing close in the registers we hold; the coverage panel shows which ones.
When to file
If the name passes and you will build on it, file. A registration is what lets you remove copycats. TM Atlas is the screening before the filing; a trademark attorney or the office itself handles the filing.