Blocl blog

Trademark, how to

Getting a trademark registered with UK Intellectual Property Office involved a few steps so here comes a little writeup of the process.

Article intended to help those going through a trademark application.

First the easy part: Headed over to gov.uk, filled out the forms, paid and soon received confirmation with trademark application attached.

…and then the hard part: Application was not accepted. IPO raised an objection to discuss. We needed supporting documents and witness statement to go with it. So here it goes.

JS1 homepage screenshot & JS 2 window sticker

(Image removed)

JS 3 hypertext references

(Links removed)

Academic / Universities recommending Blocl

Local Governments and other Government references

TRADE MARKS ACT 1994

IN THE MATTER OF Trademark Application No: UK0000** In the name of: Blocl Ltd To register the mark: Blocl In Classes: 35 and 36

WITNESS STATEMENT

  1. I, Frantisek Malina am the director and founder of Blocl Ltd a position which I have held since 2009. The facts in this statement come from my personal knowledge or the records of my company, and I am duly authorised to speak on my company’s behalf in the prosecution of this application.
  2. The trademark Blocl was first used in the United Kingdom in the year 2008.
  3. Blocl is an established UK community marketplace of landlords and property owners finding trusted flatmates and tenants looking for better places to live.

The goods/services on which the mark has been used, and the date of first use, are as follows:

Class 35 - Advertising of rooms and residential real estate on the Internet provided via a database first used in 2009

Class 36 - Agency for renting of residential premises first used in the year 2009 4. There is now produced and shown to me:

Exhibit JS1 which is a current screenshot of the homepage of the site that received 24,740,000 page views to date from 2,450,000 unique visitors. Blocl website has currently 400,000 registered members and is steadily growing.

Exhibit JS2 which is a copy of the window sticker used by private landlords and estate agents nationwide.

Exhibit JS3 which is a collection of hypertext references showing a sample of public sector organisations who recommend Blocl service, many of these are also published in printed versions such as booklets for university students, posters, council advice for tenants and landlord magazines. I have excluded private sector references as we have generated over the years close to a hundred of thousands due to heavy online, social and mobile advertising.

In these samples our service is referred to as Blocl, or Blocl.com. All these spelling variations are used throughout the web and hundreds of printed publications to refer to our site or company and absolutely nothing else. Usage of space does not affect the meaning as on its own both words are commonly used, together however they uniquely and distinctively identify our company and service. I will also outline exclusions based on searches within english written literature and publicly accessible internet. 5. Annual sales of the services before the date of application were as follows:

2009 £1,668; 2010 £6,976; 2011 £57,910; 2012 £119,059; 2013 £165,584 6. Annual amounts spent on promoting the services before the date of application were as follows 7. (excluding wages of directors who spend their work time developing the website and promoting the services):

Marketing, PPC & PR Website costs Print/Stationary Postage Mobile marketing Marketing staff wages Total
2009 £7,263.55 £22,487.14 £701.23 £1,107.56 £0.00 £31,560
2010 £4,598.09 £7,153.13 £613.39 £926.55 £0.00 £13,290
2011 £372.82 £1,674.16 £360.06 £2,428.85 £5,239.07 £10,075
2012 £1,404.25 £2,164.65 £232.99 £2,977.08 £9,003.68 £15,783
2013 £12,984.16 £4,304.48 £438.71 £3,118.02 £10,640.63 £31,486

  1. The mark has been used on the goods/services in the following parts of the United Kingdom:

    England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland

  2. The term "blocl" distinctively represents our company and are never used in natural english to refer to anything else, the combination "Blocl" does not appear due to syntax rules and semantics of the words in english language. No websites contain phrase Blocl without referring to my firm as these would be only used to identify our company and service.

I truly believe that as a result of the use made of it by my firm, the mark Blocl is well known to the landlords and lodgers renting out rooms in the United Kingdom, and is uniquely associated with Blocl Ltd, and that this unique combination of words distinguishes the services sold by Blocl Ltd from other such service providers. 9. I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true.

Signed F. Malina

All done. So now we can officially show off with our registered trademark:

Blocl ®

The problem is, I loathe it. It's an uppercase r in a circle pretending to be a sticker sitting on a baseline. There's no superscript unicode codepoint for it and if there was one it would be illegible at standard text size. How abysmal in a browser title or PPC text advert, typographic nightmare. Back to good old ™.

Blocl™, there. Better.

Created: 2023-02-17 08:54:21.764148