Who owns your name after you sell your business?

You built the business. You signed it with your name. Then you sold it. Years later you launch something new, and a letter arrives from the buyer's lawyers telling you the name on the door is no longer yours to use.

It is one of the more contentious corners of intellectual property, and it is coming up more often in the UAE as founder led businesses change hands. The short version is that the law will usually let you identify yourself truthfully as the creator of new work. What it will not let you do is quietly rebuild the brand you already sold.

There are two issues to keep apart.

The contract you signed

The first is the sale agreement itself. The buyer paid for the business, and that price almost always included the brand and its goodwill. Acquisition agreements routinely restrict what a former owner can and cannot do for a defined period after completion, through non compete, non solicit and brand use clauses. Before you do anything with your name, the agreement is the first document to read. In many disputes the answer is sitting in a clause that was negotiated at speed and never revisited.

Trademark law

The second is trademark protection. Under Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 on Trademarks, a personal name can be registered and protected as a trademark. If your name was registered by the company you sold and assigned across in the deal, using it to promote new products can amount to infringement. UAE courts have shown they will grant strong relief to protect registered rights, and recent rulings have also given weight to genuine prior use, so the factual history matters.

Even where no mark is registered, you are not in the clear. If the buyer has built up reputation and goodwill in your name, using it in a way that suggests endorsement by or connection to the old business can expose you to a passing off style claim. What matters is not what you intended, but how the market reads it.

A live example: Jo Malone

The point is being tested right now in the courts. The perfumer Jo Malone sold her eponymous brand, including the rights to her own name, to Estee Lauder in 1999, agreeing not to use the Jo Malone name in certain commercial contexts including fragrance marketing. She later founded a new label, Jo Loves, and ran a fragrance collaboration with Zara.

In 2026 Estee Lauder sued Jo Malone, Jo Loves and Zara's UK arm for breach of contract, trademark infringement and passing off. The trigger was wording on the packaging and product listings crediting the products to her by name as the founder of Jo Loves. The defence argues, in part, that the wording follows guidance the buyer itself had given on how her name could be used.

Whatever the outcome, the case is a clean illustration of the central tension. A founder may feel she is simply telling the truth about who created a product. The buyer sees the same words as trading on the brand equity it paid for. The line between the two is exactly where these disputes live.

Where the line sits

In practice, using your name descriptively is usually fine. Crediting yourself as the founder, designer or creator of a product, or appearing in a biography or acknowledgment, sits on the safe side of the line.

The difficulty starts when your name begins to work as a brand rather than a credit. Tell tale signs are using it as the product name, on packaging, in campaign headers, as a domain or as a social handle, or with a prominence that signals it is the brand itself. That is the point where truthful attribution turns into rebuilding the brand by stealth.

The Crowe takeaway

Name rights are easiest to protect when nobody is fighting over them yet. If you are selling, negotiate explicit carve outs for future personal and professional use before signing, and define exactly which marks transfer. If you are buying, make sure the agreement captures the goodwill you are paying for. If you have already sold and want to start again, get the position checked before you print a single label.

Our corporate, legal and tax advisory team works with founders and acquirers across the UAE on exactly these questions, from deal structuring through to trademark strategy.