Is this a trademark infrigement?

[Karimbo]

Hello

I want to sell my own building block toys. I want to focus on a very specific subset of these toys. Imagine dolls house sub-section of building block toys. I've identified there is a lot of demand for these speciifc subsection. The branded stuff has a huige organic draw in google search. People search for [brand name] dolls house.

But there's really no money in selling this branded toy. LIke they wholesale price might be £43inc, and RRP is £50inc. Where is the margin if you dont have a supermaket with footfall who can just sell these items on impulse? You have delivery cost, cost of customers acquisition, storage cost etc.

The real margin lies is selling generic building block toys where you can buy for £15 and sell for £35.

Obviously I can't use their protected trademark and sell generic brand building block toys. But I can sell their authentic branded products and get traffic from google organic to sell the item - I might sell a few, then they might be temporarily out of stock. But then the product pages will have alternative items for sale selling the unbranded products I source direction from china.

Is that plausable?

I am seeing this through the lens of say smyths who sell branded stuff but also sell their own brand toys, or 3rd party branded building block toys.

I know a lot of people will say consult a lawyer, but I have plenty of experience with lawyers and they rarely give definitive answers, they will say their opinion is favourable towards that opinion and still leave things up in the air, so just seeing what others think here.

 

[Sean Lee-Amies]

Hey. I run a marketing/sales agency.

I feel like it's a good idea in theory but in the real world you're going to come up against some tough challenges, not with trademark infringement but with marketing.

1: All you're doing is selling other company's products - there's nothing illegal about that as long as you don't source the products illegally and you don't require any special agreements to do re-sell them.

2: People who buy brands are typically bought into said brand. This is the primary commercial value of having a brand, people only want to buy from you and only you. You're working against the grain of consumer wants here.

If you were planning to target keywords without a brand name in, this would be a more commercially viable route.

3: Ranking in the top 3 of Google is one thing, staying there is another. If Google detects that your page is visited by lots of people who go onto your site and then immediately come off it (because you don't sell what they want) then you stand a good chance of dropping off the first page.

Have you conducted any SEO research yet, do you know how competitive the keywords you want to rank for are? Typically if there's any commercial interest there, you'll be going up against companies investing a lot into content creation.

You may find that you need to invest a lot into genuinely useful content, just to get to rank 10-20.

AI generated content is not a solution to anything when it comes to SEO, other than increasing the efficiency of content creation agencies/teams.

 

[Karimbo]

Hey. I run a marketing/sales agency.

I feel like it's a good idea in theory but in the real world you're going to come up against some tough challenges, not with trademark infringement but with marketing.

1: All you're doing is selling other company's products - there's nothing illegal about that as long as you don't source the products illegally and you don't require any special agreements to do re-sell them.

2: People who buy brands are typically bought into said brand. This is the primary commercial value of having a brand, people only want to buy from you and only you. You're working against the grain of consumer wants here.

If you were planning to target keywords without a brand name in, this would be a more commercially viable route.

3: Ranking in the top 3 of Google is one thing, staying there is another. If Google detects that your page is visited by lots of people who go onto your site and then immediately come off it (because you don't sell what they want) then you stand a good chance of dropping off the first page.

Have you conducted any SEO research yet, do you know how competitive the keywords you want to rank for are? Typically if there's any commercial interest there, you'll be going up against companies investing a lot into content creation.

You may find that you need to invest a lot into genuinely useful content, just to get to rank 10-20.

AI generated content is not a solution to anything when it comes to SEO, other than increasing the efficiency of content creation agencies/teams.

Thanks, you're right, I think at some point there will be issues with relevancy. The primary sale would need to be the actual branded product. I think having the branded product available for sale will be a requirement. While there are diehards who only want the branded product but equally there are majority casuals who are OK with aftermarket products. It's just the brand name has become strongly used for the type of toy, so search terms for "brick building dolls house" have next to no volume. But [brand name] dolls house has decent volume. The brand name is now just known for that toy type.

on google there are people who are just using that brand name and selling non-original product and some of these websites have been around for a while according to archive.org - I would never want to risk doing that. I know the company that owns the trademark and litigous. I have seen some websites who are violating two trademarks at the same time. The brick building company collabs with disney/marvel/star wars and these UK sellers are violating both IPs selling stuff droppshipped from china.

I just dont see a path to making money selling these branded products. I have been doing research on various toy sellers small ltds. The most impressive retailer was doing 500K turnover a year with abnormally high profits for selling these branded items at around £300K (worked out based on the corp tax liability). Their turnover was on their linkedin bio.

This seller was selling on ebay and they seemed to be selling excluisively liquidation stock. A tonne fo toys r us stuff. I'm looking at wholesaler prices and the RRP and there is no way an independant trader can make money buying from a wholewsaler and selling online. The stock needs to be acquired at rock bottom prices.