A lot of our clients get confused when trying to understand the difference between a company name and a trademark. Are they the same? What about the business name? And the domain name? Does it have to match the company name and trademark? There are a lot of questions and figuring these all out is not easy.

  • Company name: Legal name of the company, either registered federally or in a certain state (or province in Canada).

Our company name is Angel Trademark Services International Ltd.

Does our company name have to match the trademark? No. It does not. Do our clients really care or have to remember how our company is called? No. They don’t care. What happens if the company closes down? Will the trademark die? No. A trademark can be transferred to another entity (person or legal entity).

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In fact, we already transferred our TRADEMARK ANGEL trademark from our Canadian company Trademark Angel Inc. to Angel Trademark Services International Ltd. during the restructuring process.  Did our clients know about this or care? No.

The purpose of the trademark is to help your clients to identify your brand with your business. If the business goes through transformation, restructuring, or if it’s sold in many cases clients are not even aware of this. As long as there is no disruption of the operations, nobody will even notice, unless you notify your clients yourself.

Note: one company may own more than one brand and may do business under more than one name.

  • Business name, trade name, operating name, or doing business as Name under which you conduct your business.

Our company Angel Trademark Services International Ltd. Is doing business as Trademark Angel. A company is said to be “doing business as” when the name under which they operate their business differs from its legal or registered name.

In many instances, filing for a DBA is the least expensive way to use a business name (without incorporating).

So, if you don’t have an LLC or corporation set up, consider registering a DBA.

Please note that you cannot add the wording Corp., Ltd. or Inc. after you register your DBA in order not to mislead the public.

You can also use a dba if you want to operate more than one business without having to open multiple companies or LLCs.

For example, consider this: Michael set up a corporation and called MC Unique Labs Design Corp. Michael plans to offer accounting services under a DBA Account Tech Wizz, cleaning services under a DBA Cleaning Well Wizz and painting services under Painting Incredi Wizz. By doing this, he will eliminate the need to register 3 separate business entities (unless of course there is another reason to do this).

Can you file a trademark under a dba/operating name alone? No. A full legal name is required.

For better illustration, we’ll show you the difference based on our own trademark.

  • Trademark: A trademark may be one word, a combination of words, or logos (or even sounds and smells!) used to distinguish/differentiate your products or services from those of other entities.

Our trademark is TRADEMARK ANGEL. We also have a logo that you’ve probably seen (the logo is shown in the top left corner of the website: )TMA logo

Going to our above example, Michael may want to consider the following trademarks:

  1. Account Tech Wizz for accounting services. The owner will be: MC Unique Labs Design Corp. or can also file in the name of MC Unique Labs Design Corp. dba Account Tech Wizz
  2. Cleaning Well Wizz for cleaning services. The owner will be: MC Unique Labs Design Corp. or can also file in the name of MC Unique Labs Design Corp. dba Cleaning Well Wizz
  3. Painting Incredi Wizz for painting services. The owner will be: MC Unique Labs Design Corp. or can also file in the name of MC Unique Labs Design Corp. dba Painting Incredi Wizz

Domain name: Address/location of your website on the web.

Our domain name is trademarkangel.com

And trademarkangel.ca

And trademarkangle.com (as the name is commonly misspelled).

Try to obtain a few domain names with different top-level extensions and think about possible mis-spellings.

In Michael’s example, he should try to secure at least 3 domain names:

AccountTechWizz.com, CleaningWellWizz.com, and PaintingIncrediWizz