Why one document is not protection
The mistake is treating design protection as a single signature. A factory can take your product in several different ways: copy the drawings, run your tooling on a night shift, register your brand before you do, or sell finished units around you to your own customers. Each of those is a different gap, and each needs its own measure.
What actually works is a stack of four or five layers. Each one is cheap on its own. Together they make your design expensive to steal and, just as important, give you a Chinese court and a registry that will act when something goes wrong. The goal is not a wall nobody can climb. The goal is to be a harder, more expensive target than the next buyer whose only protection is hope.
Lock it down before you share anything
Timing decides whether any of this works. The strongest position is built before the first specification, the first sample, and the first factory call where you explain what you are making. Once your CAD files and tolerances are sitting in a supplier's inbox, every measure below gets weaker, and the supplier has far less reason to agree to any of them.
Treat a signed agreement and a registered trademark as the gate a new factory passes before you send a single drawing. An importer who registers and contracts first is in a different league from one who scrambles after the design is already out.
Sign an NNN, not a Western NDA
The contract that protects you in China is an NNN: Non-Disclosure, Non-Use, Non-Circumvention. The Western NDA you use at home usually does nothing here, because it only covers secrecy and a Chinese court will not enforce a foreign judgment against a factory that holds no assets in your country.
An NNN closes the gaps an NDA leaves open. Non-Use stops the factory making your product for itself or a competitor. Non-Circumvention stops it selling around you to your own customers. To be enforceable it must be written in Chinese, governed by Chinese law, placed in the court where the factory is registered, and carry a fixed penalty for breach so a court can freeze assets fast instead of arguing over lost profit. The full breakdown is in what an NNN agreement is and whether you need one.
Register your IP in China, first to file
China is first-to-file for both trademarks and patents, administered by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). Whoever registers first holds the right, even if you have sold under the brand for years at home. A factory or a professional trademark squatter who registers your name first can legally block your own goods from leaving the country until you buy the mark back.
There are three things worth filing, depending on the product:
- Trademark with CNIPA, in the product classes you actually sell in. This is the single highest-value filing for most brands. Budget roughly 12 to 18 months for registration, so start early.
- Design patent (外观设计) protects the look and shape of the product. It is not substantively examined, so it grants in roughly 6 to 12 months and is the practical choice for most consumer goods.
- Utility model (实用新型) protects how a product is built or functions, on a similar fast timeline. The slower, stronger invention patent (发明) takes two to three years of examination and suits genuinely novel technology.
For most importers, a registered trademark plus a design patent is the baseline. If you already hold a home-country trademark, note that an international filing under the Madrid Protocol still has to name China as a designated country to count there.
Keep control of the tooling and molds
Whoever holds the mold controls the product. Custom injection molds, dies, and jigs usually live on the factory floor, and a supplier that effectively owns them can quietly run extra units after hours or quote your exact item to the next buyer who walks in.
Put a tooling-ownership clause in the contract that names you as the owner. Pay for the tooling on a separate invoice from the unit price so the paper trail is clean, mark the molds as your property, and keep the written right to move them to another factory. Hold a signed golden sample too, so any later unit can be checked against exactly what you approved.
Split production and share only what's needed
No single factory needs to see your whole product. For anything with real IP value, split the sensitive components across more than one supplier and do final assembly somewhere they do not control, or in house. Send each supplier only the specification for its part, never the full design package.
A factory that only ever sees one sub-assembly cannot clone the finished item, because it never holds enough of it. This costs a little more in coordination, and for a product worth protecting it is usually worth it.
What protection cannot do, and what to do if you're copied
None of this makes copying impossible. What it does is make you an expensive target and give you real options when something happens: an NNN penalty a Chinese court can enforce, a registered design you can assert, and the ability to record your registered IP with China Customs (part of the General Administration of Customs, GACC) so infringing exports can be stopped at the port.
If you find a copy, gather evidence first: live listings, sample units, photos, and dates. Then bring in a Chinese IP lawyer and act through the registry and the court where the factory sits, not your home court. The China-law firm Harris Sliwoski has documented for more than a decade that importers who registered early tend to win these fights, and those who relied on a home-country NDA usually collect nothing. Protection in China is something you build before you need it, not after.
Where Mila Sourcing fits
Protecting the design is built into how we run an order, not bolted on after. We confirm the factory's registered Chinese name against its business license, put a Chinese-language NNN with a real penalty clause in front of it before any spec moves, write tooling ownership into the contract, and flag when a trademark or design filing is worth making. Where a product justifies it, we split sensitive production so no single factory holds the whole thing. That groundwork sits under Sourcing Activation and Full Production Management.
Related, if you're protecting a product right now: