Nice Classification

In practice

This is why a conflicting mark is not automatically fatal. What matters is whether the existing registration covers the classes you need. It also means a name that is clear today can become contested if the business later expands into a new class.

WIPO, which publishes the classification, describes it as an international classification of goods and services applied for the registration of marks, with a new version of each edition published every year. Classes are an organising tool, not the whole test: the USPTO notes that goods in different classes can still be related, and that the same mark can coexist only where the goods are unrelated. How classes and relatedness apply to your name is something you check yourself; this entry is orientation only.

In a naming project, the mistake is picking classes for the product you sell today. A software startup that will later sell hardware, training or a consumer app needs to know that now, because screening one class tells you little about the next. We ask for the planned expansion in the brief and screen against those classes, so the question is answered before the name is chosen rather than after the company has grown into it.

Where this sits in the process

The studio treats this as part of a single run rather than a separate service: the category is read, the creative direction is chosen from what the research found, candidates are generated in volume and then cut against criteria that were written down first. See how the studio works for what that produces, or the naming module for the stages themselves.

Related concepts

• Trademark clearance: What full clearance involves, and why it is a manual process that the owner of the name is responsible for.
• Trademark screening: The early look for obvious conflicts, and where it ends and the full search of prior rights begins.
• Likelihood of confusion: Why a name does not need to match an existing trademark to be refused: the confusion test explained.