Since 2003
Two practices. One operational company.
BrandConcern was established in 2003 by combining the activities of sister companies Pretection and Bluehorn into a single operational company.
What began as internet brand protection and global web presence became a practice for mapping, negotiating, and resolving legitimate but overlapping rights.
Established
2003
Seat
Zoetermeer, Netherlands
Chamber of Commerce
KvK 34186730
Before the company had a name for the work — 2000
Around 2000 the public internet was already a commercial territory, but continuous protection against online trademark and model infringement was not a service a brand could buy. Searches were commissioned once, read once, and filed.
Pretection was one of the first companies to offer it as an ongoing practice: continuous reporting on trademark and model infringements online, month after month, rather than a single snapshot of a moving landscape.
The two houses
From 2000
Pretection
One of the first internet brand-protection practices: continuous reporting on trademark and model infringements for international rights holders. Clients included LVMH, Comité Colbert (Baccarat), DuPont, and Nijntje/Miffy — with global protection activities carried out for all of those brands.
Sister company
Bluehorn
Global internet presence for multinational brands — building and managing the official presence itself. Work included Numico — Nutricia, Nutrison, Olvarit, and Zonnatura — and Red Bull. Numico was a Zoetermeer-rooted nutrition group later acquired by Danone.
The combination, 2003
The sister companies were not discarded. Their activities were concentrated in one operating company so that protection, presence, and rights could be treated as one system rather than three separate errands.
BrandConcern B.V. became that company, registered in the Netherlands and seated in Zoetermeer.
What carried forward
01
The web is a rights landscape, not only a marketing channel.
02
Trademarks, models/designs, domains, trade names, and presence belong in one map.
03
Reporting is not the end of the work; resolution is.
From protection to resolution
The early work watched infringement and built official presence. Both told the same story from opposite ends: a brand exists online as a set of rights, and those rights are only as good as the map you hold of them.
Congestion in the international register — unused, overlapping, dormant rights — required a different method. Not reporting alone, but procedure, negotiation, and the outcomes that follow: transfer, coexistence, withdrawal, or renewal.
Protection and presence were how one first walked the streets. BrandConcern now keeps the city standing by resolving the parcels that overlap or lie unused. The method is neutral: where rights are legitimate but overlap, we work with both sides.
The city still has to stand.
Twenty-three years on, the work is the same: mapping legitimate but overlapping rights, and resolving them before they reach a courtroom.
Bring us your overlap