Trademark Class 6: Metal goods
Common metals and their alloys, metal building materials, and small items of metal hardware.
What class 6 covers
Class 6 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 6 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 6
- Common metals and alloys
- Metal building materials
- Transportable metal buildings
- Metal hardware and fasteners
- Safes and strongboxes
- Metal pipes and tubes
- Ores
Business types that usually file here
- Steel producers
- Fastener manufacturers
- Metal fabricators
- Safe and lock makers
- Structural steel suppliers
- Mining companies
Notable brands operating in class 6
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.
- Nucor
- Steel Dynamics
- Cleveland-Cliffs
- U.S. Steel
- Alcoa
- Reliance Steel
- Commercial Metals
- Worthington
- Mueller Industries
- Simpson Manufacturing
- Fastenal
- Hillman
- Grainger
- Freeport-McMoRan
- Rio Tinto
- ArcelorMittal
- Ryerson
- Olympic Steel
- Kaiser Aluminum
- Carpenter Technology
- ATI
- TimkenSteel
- Insteel
- Gibraltar Industries
- Valmont
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.