Jewelry Business Guru by Cindy Edelstein

Trademark 101 for designers by Design*Sponge's biz ladies 09

Most designers are very careful about registering copyrights for their designs. At least most everyone KNOWS they should be very careful. But life gets in the way, you get busy and bogged down and sometimes the registration fee seems just a little too indulgent when you look at your cash flow.

But trademarks are very different. 

Here's some advice via the design*sponge blog from Amy J. Everhart,  founder of a Nashville, Tennessee, law firm to counsel clients in the creative industries, entrepreneurs, inventors, business owners, and others in the areas of copyright, trademark, entertainment, the arts and the Internet. She is the author of the copyright, trademark, and entertainment law blog “Lightbulb Moments,” located at www.aeverhart.com/lightbulbmoments.

Amy says, "Trademark issues can arise in several contexts in the design world. You might use a trademark to identify the source of a product, such as a line of note cards or a piece of jewelry. Or you might use a trademark to identify your business, such as an online store or a design firm, where you sell your artwork or provide your design services. (A related concept is trade dress, the distinctive color, shape, packaging, design, or other visual characteristics of a product that identify the source of the product, such as the distinctive shape of the Cola-Cola bottle. David Yurman has successfully sued on Trade Dress issues.)

Below linked is some of the trademark basics every business owner should ponder.

Design*Sponge » Blog Archive » biz ladies 09: trademark 101 for designers.

Social media policies from 80+ organizations -- craft yours after reading theirs

Have you thought about what's ok and what's not for your employees to say about you/your company on twitter, facebook, et al? Think they're NOT talking about you?

Read other's policies on Mashable.com and then come up with your own:

One of the key challenges for modern organizations is to define a social media policy. What’s acceptable? What isn’t? And how should you go about creating such a document for your workplace?

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Preliminary results of our first designer jewelry business best practices poll

Here is what we got in just the first couple of hours of our new Best Practices Business Survey on "What price do you put on your tags at a wholesale show." Interesting, no?

 We'll give an overall snapshot here when we're done and participants will get a full report emailed to them. Members of our Inner Circle will be able to find the results on the members' only portion of our www.jewelersresource.com website, too.

Click here to join our Survey list and never miss another survey -- or complete, annotated report.

What do you hope we ask next time? Email me at cindy@jewelersresource.com and maybe we'll take you up on it. Someone has already asked about collections and product placement.