Some products are their shape. The silhouette of a lamp, the proportions of a bottle, the pattern on a tile, the way a handle meets a body: the engineering is ordinary and the appearance is what the customer pays for. When a copy of that appears on a European marketplace, the first question anyone asks is which right you hold over the look — and the answer is often that nobody ever decided, because the product was shown before anybody thought about it.
The two ways Europe protects the look of a product
The first is a registered design: an application filed with the Union's intellectual property office, covering the appearance of a product or part of it — lines, contours, shape, surface, texture, materials, ornamentation. One application covers the whole internal market. The office checks the formalities and whether the subject is eligible; it does not search for earlier designs and does not verify that yours is new. The right lasts and is renewable in successive periods up to a maximum fixed by the legislation, and it works against any later design that produces the same overall impression on an informed user — whether or not the other party ever saw yours.
The second is an unregistered right, and most exporters have never heard of it. It arises on its own, with no application and no fee, when the design is first made available to the public within the Union. It has two differences that decide everything: it lasts a short time and cannot be renewed, and it only works against deliberate copying. The holder has to show the other side copied, which is the difficult part — a competitor who arrived at a similar appearance independently does not infringe it. It is a real right, useful for a seasonal range nobody could afford to file piece by piece, and it is not a substitute for a registration.
- Getting the right. The registered design is applied for, with representations, a fee and a filing date you can prove from a public register. The unregistered one needs nothing but disclosure in the Union — and therefore nothing proves it except the dated evidence you kept yourself.
- What it stops. The registered design stops any later design giving the same overall impression, independent creation included. The unregistered one stops copying only, which leaves out the competitor who says, credibly or not, that they never saw your product.
- What you have to prove. With a registration you produce the certificate and argue about overall impression. Without one you must first prove that you disclosed, when, and where, then that the design is new, then that the other side copied. Each of those is a fight.
- How long you keep it. The registration is renewable in successive periods up to the maximum the law allows. The unregistered right runs from first disclosure for a short fixed period and then is simply gone — and the disclosure that created it has also become an earlier disclosure against any registration you try to file afterwards.
- What each is actually for. Register the designs that carry the range: the hero product, the shape that will be copied, the one still selling several seasons from now. Let the unregistered right cover the long tail you could never justify filing — and know that for the tail, your remedy depends on proving a copy.
Why novelty is the condition everything else rests on
To be protected, a design has to be new and have individual character: no identical design made available to the public before, and an overall impression on the informed user that differs from what already existed. Novelty is destroyed by any earlier disclosure of the same design — by a competitor, by a supplier, and by you. The office does not check this, which is the trap. Your registration is granted, the certificate arrives, the file looks solid; the weakness only surfaces the day you try to use the right, and the other side applies for invalidity and produces your own catalogue, your own marketplace listing, your own photograph from the fair.
Two details decide most real cases. The first is that disclosure counts wherever it happened, as long as it could reasonably have become known to the professionals of the sector operating in the Union — so a listing on a Chinese platform, a domestic trade fair, a supplier's own catalogue or a social post can be the disclosure that destroys your European filing. The second is that the legislation does allow a period of grace after the designer's own first disclosure, during which a filing is still possible. That grace exists, it is short, and it is not a plan — relying on it means having to prove who disclosed, when, and that the disclosure was yours, in front of somebody arguing the opposite.
The order: file, then show
- Decide which products in the range have an appearance worth a right. Not all of them do, and filing everything is how a budget disappears on items that will be discontinued.
- Prepare the representations with care: clean, consistent views showing exactly what you claim and leaving out what you do not. The views are the scope of the right, which is why they are the part worth paying somebody to get right.
- File — and ask for deferment of publication if the launch has to stay confidential. The register allows a filing to be kept out of sight for a period, which lets you hold the date without showing competitors what is coming.
- Then disclose: the fair, the catalogue, the marketplace listing, the press, the sample sent to a prospective distributor. In that order, every one of those is a sales action rather than a risk.
- Keep dated proof of the first disclosure anyway — the dated catalogue, the stand photographs, the listing capture. It is what founds the unregistered right over everything you chose not to file.
What a design right does not do
It protects appearance, and only appearance. Features of a product dictated solely by its technical function are excluded, as are the interfaces whose shape is imposed because the part has to fit something else — which means the more purely functional your product is, the less a design right has to hold on to. It does not stop a competitor making something that performs the same job while looking different, and it is not a patent: nothing in it protects how the thing works. Nor is it a trade mark, although a distinctive shape can sometimes be both, under conditions that are harder to meet than people expect. And a design right says nothing about whether you are infringing somebody else's — the office that granted yours never looked.
Make the filing a step in the launch checklist, placed before the photo shoot and before the first listing goes live — not a legal task running in parallel. In practice that means one decision per season: which references carry the range, filed with proper views and publication deferred if needed, everything else left to the unregistered right with a dated disclosure file to support it. The mistake that cannot be repaired is the other order: the product shown, the copy appearing, and only then the question of what you own.
Where to read it yourself
Official pages, opened and checked on 15 October 2026. Where a rule changes, these are the addresses that change with it — this article does not.