Our solutions / Applying for and registering protection

Designs

Do your competitors imitate the appearance of your products? Design registration grants you exclusive rights to your designs, helping you prevent unauthorized copying.

Benefits of Design Registration

A product’s appearance plays a crucial role in its success. Even the most technically advanced product must also be visually appealing to attract customers. Because product design is a key competitive factor, successful designs are often copied.

Registering a design gives its holder the right to prevent others from commercially using designs that create a similar overall impression. Commercial use includes manufacturing, selling, importing, and exporting a product.

What Types of Designs Can Be Protected?

Design registration protects a product’s appearance, which may include its shape, lines, surface textures, or materials. Aesthetic or artistic value is not a requirement for protection.

Design registration can cover:

Industrial or handcrafted products
Product packaging
Patterns and surface structures
Graphic symbols
Visual user interfaces of software

However, design protection does not extend to technical innovations within a product. Such features may instead be protected by a patent or utility model.

Requirements for Protection

To qualify for design protection, a design must be new and have individual character:

Novelty: A design is considered new if an identical or highly similar design has not been publicly disclosed before. Disclosure can occur through earlier design applications, commercial use, or other publications. However, in the EU, a 12-month grace period allows a design to be published and used before applying for registration.
Individual Character: A design must create a distinct overall impression compared to publicly known designs before the application date. The degree of distinctiveness may depend on the product category.

Registration Authorities and Process

Designs can be registered at different levels:

EU-wide protection: Applications are submitted to the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). EUIPO does not examine whether a design is new or distinctive—these aspects are only assessed if a third party challenges the registration through a cancellation request.
National protection in Finland: Applications are submitted to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH), which evaluates novelty and individual character before granting registration.

The registration process is fast, with designs typically registered in the EU within one month. Due to cost considerations, most designs are registered at the EU level, even if protection is primarily needed in Finland.

We protect designs all around the world

In addition to the PRH and EUIPO, we act as our clients’ representative in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and internationally through Hague system at WIPO. In other countries, we protect our customers' designs through our associate firms.

Initial preparations

Before preparing and applying for protection, we review the objectives of protection, in which countries the design protection will be sought, if one or more designs are used to protect the features of the product, if parts of the products should be protected separately, and what images or drawings of the design are available. If images or drawings are available that can be used, we will proceed directly by preparing the application. If the images or drawings require amendments, the work is typically done by the client, but we have external service providers who can make the required amendments.

Drafting and filing of the design application

When the pictures or drawings of the design are ready, we will prepare and submit the application to the registration authority. If the application concerns Finland, the EU, Sweden, the United Kingdom or is a so-called international application under the Hague Agreement, then we will handle the submitting and further processing of the application ourselves. If the application concerns other countries, we will use our partner office in the relevant country to draft and submit the application. We report and invoice only after the application has been submitted. As the application procedure progresses, we will report notifications and decisions issued by the registration authority. In the EU, a design application is typically accepted by the registration authority without further action. At the end of the application process, the registration authority will provide a registration certificate, which we will forward to the client.

Services after registration

In most parts of the world, design registrations must be renewed every five years for the protection to remain in force. We will monitor renewal dates and remind our clients of the need to renew their design registrations.

Please note that the cost of a design registration depends on whether there are images or drawings of the design that can be used without amendments in the design application. The number of designs contained in the application also affects the price. The consultation related to protection and the measures during the registration procedure are included in our package prices, except measures needed to overcome decisions on non-registrability due to formal or substantive reasons issued by the registration authorities.

Design example 1

For a Finnish tool manufacturer, we protected their new tool design in the European Union for 1181 € (excluding VAT), including official application and publication fees.

1266 €

Design example 2

We protected four new designs in the European Union for a domestic sports equipment designer for a total price of 2,309 € (excluding VAT), including official application and publication fees.

2433 €