Moscow’s historical center for luxury shopping, the GUM department store, has attained the rights to be the sole GUM store in Russia, leaving its counterparts with the same name to look for new titles.
The GUM name, which became a registered trademark back in 2005, has been recognized as a “well-known name” by the Russian Agency for patents and trademarks, RBC reported on Tuesday.
The newly granted status will allow Moscow’s shopping center to demand that regional stores across Russia, which trade under the same name, to change their signs.
From ‘Gosudarstvenny’ to ‘Glavny’
The shopping mecca located opposite the Kremlin has changed the traditional meaning of its abbreviation, having become the Glavny (Main) Universalny Magazin (department store), instead of Gosudarstvenny (State).
For regional department stores that kept the original meaning behind the three letters, this might result in a brand change. The new status forbids other companies to use the trademark as well as similar names, said Yevgeny Parshchikov, lawyer at Khrenov and Parterns.
The absence of a prohibition doesn’t equate to permission, although no official action has yet been taken, Olga Yudkis told RBC. Yudkis is the PR director at Bosco di Ciliegi, the luxury distributor in charge of managing Moscow’s GUM.
Legal loopholes
The department store has become widely known as the largest shopping center in Moscow’s historical centre, near Red Square, Yudkis said. “The name GUM has gained a high level of prominence among consumers in Russia and has a high distinctiveness,” she added.
The brand, however, has a long history dating back to the Soviet era, when many shops had similar names. On the vast territory located between Smolensk in the Russian west to Vladivostok in the country’s Far East, at least 18 department stores are currently using the name.
Some of the stores are now undergoing a restoration, like the one in Siberian Novosibirsk, where developers plan to house the city’s largest fish shop.
The only hope for Russia’s numerous GUMs is the country’s imperfect legislation, according to Parshchikov. “Questions of intellectual property rights are not regulated in detail in our laws,” he said, adding that Moscow’s GUM is unlikely to win these lawsuits.