By Industry
Guides

The same procedure does not play out the same way in every sector: what a restaurant needs to protect differs from what a software company needs. This category holds separate guides written for e-commerce, restaurants and cafés, hair and beauty salons, software and SaaS companies, clinics and healthcare businesses, hosting and domain providers, construction and real estate firms, and education providers.

Each article answers the same questions against the reality of that sector: which classes belong together, what can be protected besides the name itself (logo, packaging, interface, business name), what preparation a franchise or a new branch requires, and which sector-specific risks make trading without registration expensive. If your own line of work is not listed, the article covering the closest business model usually follows the same logic.

Sector differences show up most clearly in class selection. In the Nice classification, classes 1-34 cover goods and classes 35-45 cover services, and the production side of a business usually falls into a different class from its service side. A café that packages its own products has to consider both the food and drink service and the class of the packaged goods; for a software company, downloadable software and a service delivered over the cloud sit in different classes. Retail — bringing goods together for sale — is itself a separate service class, so a registration taken only in the product class does not fully protect a shop name. The second common mistake is to treat a trade name as a trademark: the name in the trade registry is the company's legal name, while the name on the signage and the packaging is the brand, and protecting it requires its own registration. That distinction becomes decisive when you open a branch, appoint a dealer or move to a franchise model, because what a contract transfers is a right of use — and the right has to exist through registration before it can be transferred. When you read the guide for your own sector, compare its class list against your range of products and services: a longer list costs more, but a class left out later needs a fresh application.