Two questions come up again and again when founders think about protecting a brand: can I trademark my own name, and what actually makes a logo strong enough to be worth protecting? Both deserve straight answers. (For the fundamentals of how trademarks work, start with our complete trademarking guide.)
Trademarking your own name
Ever walked into a business called “John’s Autoshop”? Chances are it is trademarked under the owner’s name, or a family name that has been over the door for decades. Trademarking your own name is perfectly legal, but it must be for a business purpose, and it gets murky for the same reason generic words do: other people share your name.
Say you open a nail salon called “Jami Vaughn’s Nail Salon”. The full business name can be trademarked. But if another Jami Vaughn opens “Jami Vaughn’s Fish and Bait Shop”, they are legally entitled to do so and to trademark it, as long as the business name is not the same as yours.
The bigger consideration is your future self. If you build a company under your first and last name and later sell it or move on, the name goes with the business, you will not be able to reuse it professionally on any new venture. Founders rarely start a company planning to leave it, but it happens all the time. If you are set on using your name, trademark it with your eyes open.
What makes a logo strong
Google is about as strong as a logo gets: unique, simple, and so embedded in daily life that the brand became a verb. Notice what it is not, it is not “Google Search Engine”. The name does not describe the product, and that is precisely part of its strength. Apple is the same: a simple, memorable mark with no literal connection to computers. A logo’s job is to make people think of your brand; the rest follows naturally.
At the other end sits the generic logo: “Grandpa’s Ice Cream” in plain lettering tells you exactly what is sold and gives you no reason to remember who sold it. Descriptive logos are not automatically bad, but they rarely do the job well, and as our main guide explains, generic marks are also the ones trademark offices refuse to protect. Distinctiveness pays twice: once in memory, once in law.
A strong, protectable mark is a design problem before it is a legal one. If yours needs work, that is what our brand identity service is for.
