Ask a product business what intellectual property it needs and the answer is nearly always patents, trademarks or both. The right that protects what the product looks like rarely gets a mention. The gap is worth closing, because registered designs are the cheapest and quickest registration the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) grants: fees start at £60, a decision usually arrives within two weeks, and protection can be renewed for up to 25 years. If customers know your product by its shape or its surface before they ever read the label, this is the right that covers the thing they know.
What a registered design protects
A registered design protects appearance: the shape and configuration of a product and its ornamentation, for the whole product or just a part of it. It says nothing about how the product works. A patent protects the mechanism; a design registration protects the look of the casing around it, and for plenty of consumer products the casing is where the commercial value lives.
The Registered Designs Act 1949 sets two requirements. The design must be new, and it must have individual character, meaning the overall impression it gives differs from designs already available to the public. Your own head start does not count against you. Disclosures made by you, or by someone using information obtained from you, in the 12 months before the application date are disregarded, so showing a prototype at a trade fair in March does not, by itself, stop you filing in September.
What it costs and why it is quick
As at July 2026, an online application costs £60 for one design, £85 for up to ten, then a sliding scale that tops out at £185 for up to fifty (the figures changed in April 2026, so older guides quote less). A registration lasts five years and renews in five-year blocks at £85, £110, £135 and £170, which means the full 25 years of protection for a single design comes to about £560 in official fees.
The speed has a cause. Since October 2006 the IPO has not examined design applications for novelty or individual character; it checks other grounds for refusal, and if nothing is wrong the design registers, usually inside a fortnight. The trade-off is that a certificate is no promise of validity. A competitor can attack the registration later on the very grounds the IPO never looked at, and a registration for a design that was not in fact new is a weak one, however fast it was granted.
One further option suits products still under wraps: registration, and with it publication, can be deferred for up to 12 months. The design has no protection while deferred, and completing a deferred registration costs £50 per design.
The fallbacks you get free
Two unregistered rights arise automatically, and they do the work when registration never happened.
Unregistered design right covers the shape or configuration of an article, internal or external, whole or part. It is a three-dimensional right: surface decoration falls outside it, as do features that must fit or must match another product, and the design must not be commonplace in its field. The term looks like 15 years but rarely is placing products on sale within five years of creating the design cuts it to ten years from the end of the year sales began. In the final five years, anyone is entitled to demand a licence.
Supplementary unregistered design is the post-Brexit addition. It covers the two- and three-dimensional appearance of the whole or part of a product, surface decoration included, for three years from first disclosure. Where that first disclosure happens matters. Disclosure in the UK establishes the right; first disclosure in the EU does not, and it can destroy the novelty of a later UK claim, just as a UK-first reveal can spoil the equivalent EU right. Whether a simultaneous online launch, visible in both territories at once, secures both rights is an open legal question; UKIPO guidance simply advises care over how, when and where a design is first shown.
Both rights turn on proof of what you created and when, which is why design-led businesses keep dated design documents and records of first marketing.
The Trunki lesson
Registered protection is only as strong as the images you file. The cautionary tale is PMS International v Magmatic [2016] UKSC 12. Magmatic, maker of the Trunki ride-on children’s suitcase, had registered its design as six computer-generated greyscale images, a light grey body, the wheels and strap in contrasting black, no surface decoration. PMS sold the Kiddee Case, a rival case decorated as a ladybird or a tiger, with antennae or ears. In March 2016 the Supreme Court held that the registration’s overall impression was of a wheeled suitcase in the shape of a horned animal in two contrasting colours. The registration claimed that colour contrast along with the shape; the decorated Kiddee Case gave a different overall impression; the infringement claim failed.
The filing lesson comes from the judgment itself: “a line drawing is much more likely to be interpreted as not excluding ornamentation than a CAD image”. Plain line drawings claim a shape at its most abstract, whatever colouring or decoration a copyist adds. Shaded renders pull their tonal contrasts into the right and narrow it. Lord Neuberger accepted that minimalism can itself be a feature a design claims, so a render is sometimes exactly what you want. The point is to decide on purpose, and the fee scale leaves room to file both: line drawings for the bare shape alongside renders of the finished product, as separate designs in one application.
Where copyright fits
Copyright is rarely the answer for a product’s shape. A three-dimensional product generally attracts copyright only if it qualifies as a work of artistic craftsmanship, and the courts read that category narrowly. In WaterRower v Liking [2024] EWHC 2806 (IPEC), the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court held that a wooden rowing machine was not such a work, so no copyright subsisted in its shape, even though the judge accepted the design met the EU-derived standard of originality; the two tests, he held, could not be fully reconciled. That tension awaits an appellate answer, and in the meantime the shape of an industrially made product usually needs design rights, because copyright seldom stretches that far.
Filing deliberately
Little of this is expensive. The value sits in making the choices deliberately, and a few habits recur among businesses that protect their designs well. They register early, while the grace period still covers their own launch. They watch where the first public reveal happens, because the supplementary unregistered right depends on it. They batch variants and colourways into one multi-design application while the fee scale is generous, and they choose their representations with Trunki in mind. Where registered designs sit alongside trademarks and patents when money is tight is the subject of our guide on building an IP portfolio on a startup budget.
If the look of your product is part of why customers buy it, ScalaxIP can help you work out what to register and how to present it. Get in touch.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice on your specific circumstances, please contact ScalaxIP at admin@scalaxip.com
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