After running a design studio for more than eight years now, one thing that I have learned the hard way, how important it is to register and trademark your company. After quitting my first job after two years, I started working as a freelance designer. With some great projects coming in, I felt the need to collaborate and build a team to get things done, and that led to forming a partnership with one of my ex-colleague and starting our design studio. Initially, while if was freelancing, I was doing it in my name, but as we planned to start our design studio, we had to give it a name and something that resonated with the kind of work and personality we had. So after exploring and brainstorming and rejecting a lot of words, there was one name that struck the strings of our brains, LANGOORS. Langoor means monkey in Hindi, and it was both quirky and catchy, and it had a kind of ting to it that started creating a buzz in our city. It was not just in our town that we began to get noticed nationally and even internationally. That is when we learnt about the importance of Trade Mark and company registration. We got an email from a company based out in Australia and was preparing to set up their office in India, and the company was called LANGOOR. So in that mail was a very humble request to change the name of the company to something else, the name that we got so attached to the name that brought such good projects, we were to change the company’s name in next one month. Upon discussing with many people and mentors in the field, they suggested meeting a legal consultant and discussing the matter with them. We had zero knowledge in such cases, so we fixed up a meeting and then learned that the company name was trademarked internationally. We can not do anything apart from changing the company’s name. Renaming the company was more difficult than naming the company in the first place. We had everything set up the brand language, the visual aesthetic, website domain, mail id, stationaries and whatnot. Now we had to do that again and start from scratch, which is not it; we also lost the presence we had in the market with Langoors, and then it took us another 8-10 months to reestablish the company with a new name along with extra expense we had to bear in recreating the brand assets. So the first thing we did once we finalised the new name for the company was to get the name, and the logo trademarked. And now, after seven years, DESIGN DRAMA is running smoothly, and the irony is now we have sent a mail to someone to change their studio name as we have it trademarked for us.