Six months ago, he started up Trade Mark Direct – a fully-automated, trademark registration system. The company has been trading for less than a year and has reported turnover so far of between £100,000 and £150,000.

“We’re about doing things online and automating processes, rather than using trademark attorneys,” Scarfe says. “We’ve been able to take lots of cost out of the process. We want to make registering trademarks as easy as registering domain names.”

Trade Mark Direct charges around £450 per trademark registration application. That includes a fee for producing the application, and submitting and managing the process.

Scarfe notes: “There’s always going to be a market for the stuff trademark attorneys do for top-end customers who don’t mind paying the money but there are a lot of companies out there who haven’t been able to register a trademark because it’s prohibitively expensive to do so.

“Most companies don’t have their company name registered as a trademark. Once you have your name registered, you have sweeping powers to do all kind of things to people who infringe upon your trademark.”

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