Choosing a business name is the most public decision a founder makes, and one of the most under-researched. A name that clears Companies House but infringes a registered trademark can force a costly rebrand within 12 months — losing every customer, link and search ranking the original name accumulated. This guide covers the four checks every founder should do before printing a single business card.
Your registered company name must be unique on the Companies House register, must include 'Limited' or 'Ltd' (for private limited companies), and cannot include 'sensitive' words such as 'Royal', 'British', 'Bank', 'University' without specific permission. The full sensitive word list is published on gov.uk.
'Same as' rules treat very similar names as duplicates — 'Apex Trading Ltd' and 'Apex-Trading Ltd' would clash. Companies House also blocks 'too like' names where confusion is likely. Search the register before paying the £50 incorporation fee.
Companies House clearance does not protect you from trademark infringement. Trademarks are registered through the IPO (Intellectual Property Office) by class of goods and services. A clothing brand and a software company can share a name only if their classes do not overlap.
Search the IPO trademark register and the EU TMview database for your proposed name across the classes you'll trade in. UK class 35 covers retail and business services; 41 education and entertainment; 42 software and technical services; 9 covers most software products. A 30-minute search now beats a £20,000 rebrand later.
UK trademark registration costs £170 for one class plus £50 per additional class via the IPO online service. The application takes 4 to 6 months if uncontested. Once granted, the trademark lasts 10 years and is renewable indefinitely — and gives you the right to stop others using the same or confusingly similar names within your classes.
Most small businesses register two or three classes covering current and likely-near-future activities. EU and international protection require separate filings (EUIPO for the EU, WIPO Madrid Protocol for global). Most UK startups protect UK first and add international coverage when expanding.
An exact-match .co.uk and .com pair is increasingly rare. Hyphenated, alternative TLDs (.io, .ai, .uk) and short brandable names have become acceptable. What matters is consistency — same handle across your domain, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and any platform your customers use.
Buy variants and obvious typos to prevent squatters. Set up email forwarding from misspellings to your real address. Brand monitoring tools (BrandMentions, Mention, free Google Alerts) catch unauthorised use early when it's still easy to handle.
Short, memorable, easy to spell and easy to say on a phone call beats clever or descriptive in almost every case. Generic descriptive names are hard to trademark, hard to rank in search and easy to confuse with competitors. Made-up words (Kodak, Spotify, Google) start unknown but build distinctive brand equity.
Avoid current trends that age fast (replacing letters with numbers, dropping vowels). Test the name on people unfamiliar with your industry — if they cannot spell it after hearing it, you'll lose customers to typos forever. Run a Companies House check, IPO trademark search, domain check and Google search before committing.
Yes — they're entirely separate. Companies House protects you from another company sharing your exact registered name. Trademarks protect the brand itself across goods and services.
Yes — that's a 'trading as' name. You must include the registered company name and number on invoices, websites and signage.
If you can prove prior use in trade in the same class, you may have grounds to oppose. But trademark registration is a powerful first-mover advantage — file early.
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