Recently, I’ve been channeling my inner Paul Lesko (@Paul_Lesko) and started researching trademarks owned by trading card manufacturers, both past and present. And while most of you reading this may not think it’s a very interesting pastime, I urge you to take five minutes from your busy schedule and perform a few searches. Here’s a tip: the most interesting searches are the ones of defunct brands (i.e. Fleer, Signature Rookies, etc).
In order to start searching, you’ll need to go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office website, but more specifically, you’ll want to use the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS). Using TESS will take you to another page giving you options in how you’d like to search. I’ve only been using the Basic Word Mark Search which has provided a wonderful stroll down memory lane. Feel free to use the other search options to see what you come up with. Before you know it, that five minutes I asked you to spend on this site will turn into an hour, if not more.
I do want to warn you though, some of these brands have fairly common names (i.e. Score, Front Row, etc) and searching those terms will yield tens or hundreds of options and some digging may be required. And some brands, such as Fleer, will yield hundreds of results in their own right.
Just in case you don’t want to search these on your own, here are a few searches I’ve executed for you. Enjoy!