About TMGuard

TMGuard is a trade mark monitoring platform built by a brand owner who needed one, and found that everything on the market was built and priced for law firms.

I am Adrian Cherciu. I am not a trade mark attorney and TMGuard is not a law firm. I would rather you know that in the first three lines than discover it in the footer.

What I am is a business owner who has spent the last decade putting marks on registers and keeping them there. I hold registered trade marks in the UK and the European Union. Two oppositions have been filed against my applications, both by represented opponents; both were withdrawn in full and both marks registered. I have filed oppositions at the EU office in my own name, in Turkey through Istanbul counsel and at the USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board through US counsel, and two Letters of Protest in the United States. When I went looking for a service that would simply tell me when somebody filed for one of my brands, nothing existed at a price that made sense for a business my size.

So I built it.

The short version

• Founder of TORQEN, a UK automotive parts distributor trading since 2014, selling worldwide
• Registered trade mark holder in the UK and EU, including TORQEN and TMGUARD
• Two oppositions faced, both withdrawn in full, both handled personally without representation: one from the entity behind Triumph Motorcycles, one from TIA (GB) Limited, the tyre and wheel group behind the Torque Tyres brand, which had also opposed the same mark in the UK in 2017.
• Oppositions filed at the EUIPO, at the Turkish office through Istanbul counsel and at the TTAB through US counsel; two Letters of Protest filed at the USPTO
• Licensed register data from the UK Intellectual Property Office and the EUIPO, plus USPTO data
• TMGUARD is itself a registered UK trade mark, No. UK00004345511
• Listed in the LawtechUK Ecosystem Tracker

Why this exists

In 2014 I started TORQEN. We sell body kits, aero parts, performance components and styling parts for European, Japanese and exotic cars, to enthusiasts, tuning shops and dealerships. Thousands of orders shipped worldwide, including into all 27 European Union member states, and a North American business built with a long-established specialist partner.

While I was building TMGuard, from February 2026, the TORQEN name started appearing on registers I had nothing to do with. Akcesorex, a Polish trader, filed for it across the entire European Union and registered torqen.eu on the day of filing; the application was withdrawn before I had to oppose it, and torqen.eu is now mine. A company registered in Wyoming, run from a UK address, filed for it in the United States. A business in Ankara filed for it in Turkey. A Spanish gate-automation company filed for it in the EU. A Romanian holding company filed three EU applications and an international one.

None of them had to tell me, and that is not a flaw in the system. It is how the system works. Every trade mark register is a public list that anybody can file into. When an application publishes, a window opens for anyone with prior rights to object: two months in the UK, three in the EU, thirty days in the United States. Nobody writes to tell you the window has opened. If you are not watching the register on the day your conflict publishes, it opens and closes without you, and the first you hear is a letter telling you to stop using your own name.

For over a decade I was not watching, because the services that watch are built for law firms: priced per mark, per jurisdiction, sold through a sales call, with interfaces designed for someone processing hundreds of marks a week. For a business with a handful of marks and no in-house counsel, that market does not really exist.

I built TMGuard because the alternative was to keep not knowing.

The record

Credentials in this field are not adjectives. They are files, and files are public. Everything below can be checked against the registers.

Marks I hold. TORQEN, registered in the UK since 2018 and in the European Union since 2026. TMGUARD, registered in 2026. I also hold the UK registrations for PANDEM and ROCKET BUNNY, the brands of Japanese designer Kei Miura's TRA Kyoto. TORQEN has worked with those products since 2014, and in 2023 TRA Kyoto appointed TORQEN, under a signed power of attorney, as its brand protection and enforcement partner for the United Kingdom. That work is practical, not ceremonial: takedown demands to marketplaces, infringement notices, and evidence to UK enforcement bodies against counterfeit Rocket Bunny and Pandem products. Keeping fakes of somebody else's brand off the market taught me at least as much about brand protection as defending my own.

Oppositions I have faced. Triumph Designs Limited, the entity behind Triumph Motorcycles, opposed my ROCKET BUNNY application on two grounds, likelihood of confusion and reputation. I handled it myself: narrowed the specification with a single limiting clause, challenged the distinctiveness of the word relied on, and filed a particularised counterstatement requesting proof of use. Triumph withdrew the opposition in full, each party bearing its own costs, and the mark registered in July 2026.

My European TORQEN application was opposed in June 2026 by TIA (GB) Limited, the tyre and wheel group behind the Torque Tyres brand, which had opposed my UK application in 2017; that application registered in June 2018. This time I offered a narrowed specification removing the goods their earlier rights actually touched. They accepted and withdrew. The mark registered on 12 August 2026, four months and ten days after filing, through an opposition, with no representative on either side of the file.

These two outcomes do not prove that oppositions are easy, or that professional advice is unnecessary; for anything contested, a qualified trade mark attorney is the right answer. What they prove is narrower and more useful: an opposition is decided by the overlap between two lists of goods, most specifications are drafted wider than the business behind them, and an owner who knows the procedure and acts inside the deadline has real options. That knowledge, and the deadline, are the whole game.

Oppositions and protests I have filed. An opposition at the EUIPO in my own name. An opposition in Turkey through Istanbul counsel, with TORQEN's own Turkish application filed on Paris Convention priority. Two Letters of Protest at the USPTO: the first was not considered, which taught me to check the state of a file before spending money on it.

Pending: the second Letter of Protest, the Turkish opposition, one EU opposition, and an opposition at the TTAB, through US counsel, against a mark one letter away from TORQEN. TORQEN's own US application, filed in July 2026 through US counsel on a specification I wrote, is under examination. As at 26 September 2026.

And TMGUARD itself was challenged. During its opposition window, an anonymous third party filed a formal observation arguing the mark was descriptive and should be refused. The examiner reviewed it, declined to act, and the mark registered the same day. The platform that watches the register is on the register, and it got there through the same process as everyone else.

Why you can trust the data

TMGuard does not rent its data from a wholesaler. It takes it from the offices.

The UK register arrives by direct licensed feed from the Intellectual Property Office, updated daily. The EU register arrives from the EUIPO, under a licensed EUIPO Download agreement signed in 2026. The US register comes from USPTO data. Holding licensed feeds from both the UK and EU offices is rare at this price.

That is 21.2 million marks, matched daily against what you own.

Underneath it sits the work that took longer than the platform did: the complete retrievable record of UK opposition outcomes, 12,052 published decisions from 1998 to 2026, every year matching the IPO's own listing when checked quarter by quarter on 21 September 2026. 11,953 published UK tribunal decisions carry a structured analysis, each across 108 fields covering the parties, the grounds, the evidence, the outcome per class and the costs. Of the 12,052, 99 are held out: 70 with no PDF published by the IPO, 25 not yet analysed, 2 where the IPO's site serves the wrong PDF under the decision's number, and 2 with no readable text. That record is what turns an alert from "something similar was filed" into "here is what the published decisions show for marks and classes like these".

If you want to check the platform rather than take my word, the /security page documents the security posture.

Two things TMGuard does not do with that data. It does not use register data to contact anyone: the people who write to us are the people who found us. And it does not mix machine analysis with anything a person commissioned: every analysed decision carries the model and prompt version that produced it, and any practitioner can ask to review our classification of decisions they acted in. Where our checks find a defect in a published decision, we report it to the office.

Who it is for

TMGuard is deliberately not built for large corporates, who are well served already. It exists for the business with a couple of marks and no legal department, which is where I was standing when I started.

The company

TMGUARD LTD, company number 17055456, registered in England and Wales.

TMGUARD is a registered UK trade mark (No. UK00004345511) of Adrian Cherciu, used under license by TMGUARD LTD.

Adrian Cherciu on LinkedIn

You can reach me directly at a@tmguard.uk. I read everything.