OBI hypermarkets may start operating in Russia under the Domus brand

The structure of the OBI home goods network – OBI Franchising Center LLC – has applied for registration of the Domus brand for all 45 classes of the International Classification of Goods and Services (ICGS), according to the Rospatent database. The application is currently under review. The new owners of the network, under the terms of the agreement with the German OBI GmbH, are obliged to rename hypermarkets in Russia, says one of the company’s partners. He clarifies that they had to do this within six months after signing the contract (it was concluded in the summer of 2022), but the process dragged on. OBI did not respond to Vedomosti’s request.

Domus is not the only possible name for the network. The same legal entity of the retailer previously submitted applications to Rospatent for the registration of trademarks HOBI, OBBI, IdeaFix, Inhouse (“Inhouse”) and QBI, however, at least one of them – IdeaFix – has already been withdrawn. This is a fairly common occurrence when a company registers several trademarks at the same time before a planned rebranding, one of which subsequently becomes its new name, says Aleksey Koshkin, patent attorney and leading trademark specialist at Online Patent. In his opinion, given that applications have been submitted for all 45 classes of the Nice Classification, it is unlikely that OBI will have no problems with at least one of them. So, for example, in the database of Rosreestr there are about a dozen trademarks with the elements “Domus” and Domus, he adds.