Registered Trade Marks - Textile Industry

Why Fabric Names Are Trade Marks

The outdoor and performance textile world runs on named technologies. A membrane, an insulation or a fleece is developed by one company, given a brand name, and registered as a trade mark so that only that company, and the garment makers it licenses, may sell cloth under that name. Gore-Tex names W. L. Gore's membrane fabrics, Thinsulate names 3M's insulation, and Polartec names the fleece family developed by Malden Mills. When a jacket advertises one of these names it is making a specific claim about whose material is inside, which is exactly why the names are protected and why a directory of them is useful.

The confusion the list guards against is real. Shoppers and even trade buyers slide into using the famous name for the whole category, saying Gore-Tex for any waterproof membrane or Polartec for any technical fleece. That misuse matters commercially, because a competitor's membrane may be excellent but it is not the registered product, and it matters legally, because trade mark owners must defend their marks against becoming generic words or lose them. Reading the list with its owners attached restores the basic fact: each of these names belongs to a particular company, recorded in the list below.

Reading the List

Patterns show up once the names sit together. W. L. Gore & Associates appears three times, for Gore-Tex, Windstopper Fleece and Activent, a measure of how much of the waterproof-breathable vocabulary one company built. DuPont appears for Hollofil, Quallofil and Micro-Loft, and 3M for Thinsulate and Lite Loft, because the insulation race of the period was fought between fibre giants with rival branded fills. Malden Mills holds both Polartec and Wind-bloc Fleece, Patagonia holds Synchilla, and the membrane challengers of the day, SympaTex, Entrant, Ultrex, TriplePoint and eVENT, each stand against a different owner.

The list below gives twenty-two marks with the owners recorded for them - a historical record of the industry's branded technologies at the time it was compiled. It comes with an important caution, covered in the next section: ownership, licences and registrations change, companies are bought and marks move, so a listing here is a starting point for a check, never the check itself.

Verify Before You Rely On It

This advice still holds: the information on this page should be verified by other resources; it is listed to the best of our knowledge, and you should double check all listings to make sure they are still current. A trade mark register search in the country where you plan to trade, the mark owner's own current site, and, for anything commercial, proper legal advice are the right next steps. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and no listing here grants any right to use any of these names.

For garment and fabric buyers, the practical habit is simple: when a supplier offers a named technology, ask whose it is, whether the supplier is licensed to sell it, and what evidence, hangtags, test results or licence documentation, comes with the cloth. The famous name is a promise about a specific material from a specific owner. This page's list helps you ask that question with the right company in mind, and the fabric section hub linked below leads back to the mills and fabric directories the list belongs with.

Some Registered Trade Marks of the Textile Industry