Trademark Class 16: Paper goods and printed matter
Paper, printed matter, books, stationery, packaging and artists' materials.
What class 16 covers
Class 16 is one of the 45 international classes used by the USPTO and most trademark offices worldwide, under the Nice Classification. Classes 1 to 34 cover goods — physical products — and classes 35 to 45 cover services. Class 16 is a goods class.
You register a mark for particular goods or services, not in the abstract. That is why the same word can be owned by unrelated businesses in different classes, and why picking the right class matters as much as picking the right name.
Typically included in class 16
- Books, magazines and printed publications
- Stationery and office paper
- Packaging materials of paper
- Artists' and drawing materials
- Adhesives for stationery
- Instructional and teaching material
- Paper hygiene products
Business types that usually file here
- Publishers
- Stationery brands
- Greeting card companies
- Packaging suppliers
- Art supply makers
- Print shops
- Planner and journal brands
Notable brands operating in class 16
Companies whose goods or services fall wholly or partly within this class. This is a list of well-known names in the space, not a ranking — there is no authoritative public measure of trademark "size", and most of these businesses hold registrations across several classes rather than this one alone.
- Hallmark
- American Greetings
- 3M (Post-it)
- Avery
- Newell Brands
- ACCO Brands
- International Paper
- WestRock
- Kimberly-Clark
- Georgia-Pacific
- Crayola
- Faber-Castell
- Sharpie
- Bic
- Moleskine
- Erin Condren
- Scholastic
- Penguin Random House
- HarperCollins
- Simon & Schuster
- Wiley
- Pearson
- Cengage
- Shutterfly
- Vistaprint
Choosing the right class
Three mistakes cost applicants the most in this area:
- Filing in too few classes. If you sell a product and also provide a service around it, that is often two classes. Registering only one leaves the other unprotected.
- Filing in too many. Each class costs a separate fee, and the USPTO expects you to be using the mark, or to have a genuine intent to use it, for everything you list.
- Ignoring related classes. Examiners routinely treat certain classes as related — clothing and clothing retail, for instance, or food products and restaurant services. A conflict in a related class can block you just as effectively as one in your own.
Our search checks related classes automatically, so a conflict in an adjacent class shows up rather than being silently ignored.