Compliance & Regulation
How Coca-Cola Protected a Bottle Shape for Over a Century
One protection expires. The other one can outlive the company that filed it. Smart brands use both, in order.
"A design patent buys you time. Trade dress, if you earn it, doesn't expire at all."
Two Tools, Two Timelines
A design patent protects the ornamental appearance of a product for a limited period — it doesn't require proving consumer confusion, just that the design is novel and non-obvious. Trade dress, by contrast, protects a look indefinitely, but only once consumers have come to genuinely associate that look with your brand (Heimlich Law, Design Patent vs. Trademark).
The Coca-Cola Playbook, Still the Best Example
Coca-Cola secured a design patent on its contour bottle shape in 1915. That patent eventually expired — design patents always do — but by then consumers so strongly associated that silhouette with Coca-Cola that the shape earned its own trade dress protection under trademark law, which doesn't expire as long as it's actively used and defended.
The Sequencing Most New Brands Miss
File the design patent early, while the look is new and unproven, then let years of consistent use build the trade dress claim underneath it — this Journal's packaging architecture article covers the structural design decisions that are actually worth this level of legal investment in the first place, since not every bottle shape is distinctive enough to be worth protecting twice.
Raw Guild Studios
We Build Beverage Brands From the Ground Up
Creative direction, naming, identity, packaging, and production — one studio, start to shelf.