We started with the name, before selling
When Saitaniya set out to take Ninja Deterrent® overseas, the first thing we touched was not the website and not a marketplace listing. It was protecting, abroad, the name of an unknown brand that had not sold a single unit.
At the beginning of 2024, before we had even founded the business as a sole proprietorship, we filed for an international trademark. Revenue: zero. No idea whether anyone would respond. At that stage, we began with the procedure to protect the name.
This column is our own story of why we chose that order. It is not an explanation of the system. What you should actually do is, as we write below, something to discuss with a specialist. Here we simply tell, honestly, what one small company thought and did.
Honestly, we wanted to put it off
To confess up front: emotionally, protecting the name was something we wanted to postpone.
We had no storefront and no orders. In front of us was a mountain of work—a site to build, photos to shoot, logistics to arrange. In the middle of that, spending money and time first on protecting a name, for revenue that did not yet exist—honestly, it was hard to move up the priority list.
We did it first anyway, because we felt “this is the one thing we can’t get back later”.
The sense that “later” is too late
A site can be rebuilt as many times as you like. If the design ages, replace it. Logistics can be reorganized as you go.
But the name is different, we thought. If the product drew even a little attention overseas and someone else had already secured the name—imagining that, it was the one thing we wanted to avoid. Being unable to act under the name of the brand we ourselves raised: that situation, above all, we did not want to create.
We had no certainty. But when we lined up “things that can be recovered” and “things that cannot”, the name clearly belonged to the latter. That decided the order.
We could not possibly have done it alone
Once we actually started the procedure, one thing became obvious immediately: this is not an area we could judge on our own.
Technical terms we had never heard kept appearing. Which countries to designate, under which classes to file—decisions came one after another. Each time, we felt that pushing ahead on amateur assumptions was dangerous, so we brought in a specialist.
In the end, that was the right call. Had we proceeded alone, we would have dropped something important. Leave it to the professionals—we felt that ordinary truth keenly.
Having done it, what we think now
To be honest, this one move did not generate any specific revenue. Protecting the name does not make orders come in the next day. It is an unglamorous investment whose results are not visible right away.
Even so, we are glad we did it. The reassurance of having laid the foundation first supported everything that came after. Building the site, running ads—we could move on the premise that “the name is protected”. That steadiness underfoot does not show in the numbers, but it was certainly working.
If there is one thing to do first, even if you have to crawl to it, for us it was this.
To those about to go overseas
If you are now trying to take good Japanese products abroad, there is one thing we can offer from our experience: before the site and before the listings, think once about how you will protect the name.
What exactly to do, however, is not something we can tell you here. The best route differs by country and product, and that is the domain of patent attorneys and other specialists. We ourselves could only move forward by relying on one.
What Saitaniya can help with is the stage before that. “We want to sell overseas but don’t know where to begin”—at that stage, we can think through the order together, drawing on what we have been through.