In 2015, after meeting at a trade show, a South Korean distributor was insistent he pay a visit to the offices of my skincare company Childs Farm. He claimed he was the sole distributor of Ella’s Kitchen food pouches in Korea. But while flattered by his interest, we explained it was too early in our journey to consider this distribution opportunity.

Within hours of leaving, he had registered our logo and “get-up” as his own with the Intellectual Property (IP) office in Seoul. He had, in effect, “stolen” Childs Farm. I was dumb-founded — and furious. How dare he take what was ours and claim it as his own?

It took us 18 months and £25,000 to prove our right to the IP of our own brand, because in the excitement of that apparent opportunity, we hadn’t done a reference check; a call to Ella’s revealed they had never heard of him.

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What surprised us most was not just the audacity but how easily it could happen and thus how exposed many growing businesses are without realising it.

Your business’s crown jewels lies in its IP. It includes ownership of your name, logo or “lock-up”, your get-up (how your product looks and is presented) and your wider brand identity. These assets represent the creative effort and investment that go into building a business. If you don’t own them, someone else can and sometimes will (or attempt to).

Registering your IP confirms ownership and gives you the legal right to stop others copying your product. Without registration, enforcing your rights is harder, slower and far more expensive.
While the cost of registering IP or taking advice from a specialist lawyer can feel significant in the early days, it can save money, time and stress in the long run.

More importantly, it allows you to scale with confidence, knowing your foundations of ownership are secure.

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At Childs Farm, our IP legal specialist, Mark Antingham, and I adopted a broad, forward-looking strategy. We registered our rights not only in the categories in which we were already trading — shampoos, moisturisers and washes — but also in those we thought we might enter in future, such as hairbrushes and sun cream.

We also registered our logo and get-up across countries that were either on our immediate radar or could be within the next five years. While South Korea wasn’t part of our plan at the time, this wider strategy helped support our claim to ownership of the Childs Farm IP internationally, strengthening our argument that an infringement had taken place.

Another cautionary tale comes from the smoothies maker Innocent Drinks. In 1999, a year after it was founded, the brand’s visual identity was created by design agency Deepend. An agreement was drafted offering the agency shares in Innocent’s holding company in lieu of payment for the copyright in the designs. That agreement was never signed, and the shares were never allocated.

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Fifteen years later, after Deepend had changed ownership, the issue resurfaced, with the new owners attempting to assert rights over Innocent’s brand identity. Although the courts ultimately found in Innocent’s favour, the dispute cost huge amounts in legal fees and could easily have been avoided through better administration.

So how should founders protect their IP assets?

First, identify what IP you have. Then make sure it is properly protected.

Trademarks

Trademarks protect your brand name, logo or lock-up. The key requirement is distinctiveness. “Childs Farm” as a name is not distinctive on its own, but the name presented in our specific font with the flying bee illustration is — and that is what we registered. A trademark lasts ten years but can be renewed indefinitely.

While unregistered trademarks can be protected by an action called “passing off”, such cases are expensive and unpredictable.

In 2024, Lidl successfully challenged Tesco for “passing off” when it used a yellow circle on a blue background for its Clubcard discounts –— identical to the Lidl logo save the name. The bigger supermarket subsequently had to change how it presented Clubcard prices in store.

Copyright

Copyright protects written, artistic and design works, generally lasting for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years.

Design

Registered design rights can protect distinctive products for up to 25 years as long as they are novel and have “individual character”.

Jimmy Choo’s “Ramona” bag had registered design rights, and yet in 2008, it was copied by an Oxford Street store owned by Towerstone Ltd. The latter chose to defend its designs as being unlike this highly promoted, iconic bag, but the High Court heard from a handbag expert who confirmed that the bags were nigh on identical and Jimmy Choo won its case.

Patents

Patents protect novel inventions, but are costly, slow and can be overtaken by innovation. A UK patent can last up to 20 years.

Third parties and employees

Ensure that any third parties you engage — designers, agencies or product developers — formally assign all IP rights to your business. The same applies to employees: contracts should clearly state that IP created in the course of employment belongs to the company.

Intellectual property may feel abstract when you are focused on sales, growth and survival, but neglecting it can undo years of hard work in a matter of weeks. Registering your IP is not about bureaucracy; it is about protecting value, enabling growth and safeguarding the future of your business.

Done properly, IP registration turns creativity into a defensible asset that investors value, partners respect and competitors think twice before challenging.

Joanna Jensen founded skincare firm Childs Farm. She is an angel investor and chair of the EIS Association. Her book — Making Business Childs Play: how to build a wining brand — is published by Kogan Page

Hannah Prevett is away