There's a moment in building a product when the excitement starts to feel real.
The R&D is done. The samples have gone out. The testing is behind you. You've obsessed over every detail for months, and one day you come up for air and think wait. I need a name for this thing.
That moment came for me in 2012. I'd been deep in the process of bringing a new cooking surface to life a thick slab of steel, built in my family's fabrication shop in Hanover, Massachusetts, that could transform the way home cooks made pizza, bread, and just about anything else that needed serious heat. I knew what it did. I knew why it worked. I just didn't know what to call it.
So one night I sat down with my wife Leslie and we started brainstorming.
Leslie knew the stakes. I'd grown up watching my father build businesses, and he had a few inventions and trademarks along the way. We both understood that a trademark wasn't just a legal formality it was an asset. Something that could protect everything you'd built and separate you from everyone who came after.
About five minutes in, Leslie looked at me and said: why don't you just call it what it is, a Baking Steel?
We didn't want to be locked into "pizza." This thing could bake bread, roast vegetables, sear meat, we knew from the start it was bigger than one use case. Baking Steel captured all of it. Simple. Direct. Exactly what it was.
I loved it immediately.
A few months later, a friend of mine Jon Olson, designed a logo for us. Bold, distinctive, the word "Baking" in red and "STEEL" in gray alongside a rectangular mark with heat lines radiating off it. It was exactly right. We filed for the trademark and got it registered in 2013.
But there was a catch.
The trademark office granted us the logo mark. They wouldn't give us the word mark, the standalone words "Baking Steel" in any font, any color, any context. Their position: the name was too descriptive of the product itself.
It was a punch in the gut. But we had good early advice: build the brand, generate sales, establish the name in the market, and then appeal again. So that's what we did.
Two years later, we reapplied. Denied again.
I won't pretend that didn't sting. But I'm not wired to quit on something I believe in. We shelved the application, kept growing, kept telling the story, kept putting Baking Steels in home kitchens across the country.
In 2017, five years after our Kickstarter launch we applied one more time.
This time, the trademark office granted us the word mark.
BAKING STEEL. Ours. Registered. Protected.
I remember the moment I found out. It was one of those quiet, private wins that doesn't come with a press release or a party, just a deep exhale and the knowledge that something important had been secured. We owned the term. Not just the logo, not just the design, the words themselves. In any form. In any context. For kitchen equipment.
If you know anything about trademarks, you know what that means. Owning the word mark means no one else can use the term "Baking Steel" for kitchen equipment in any font, any color, any context. We named the category. We own it.
A year later, on April 1st, 2018, Baking Steel Company officially spun off from Stoughton Steel, my family's fabrication business, and became its own company.
But that's a story for another day.
The "BAKING STEEL" word mark is registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office under Serial Number 97272423. You can look it up.
