Will you steal my brand?

No, and the honest version of that answer is longer than the word. We sell our own house brands openly and under our own names, so a buyer’s brand is not something we have a use for. What actually protects you is not our intention, though: it is a registration held in your name in the market where you sell, and an NDA signed before your files ever reach us. We do the second and we will tell you plainly that we cannot do the first for you.

Do you sign an NDA before I send artwork?

Yes. Our template has been through external legal review and is available on request, before any file changes hands. We do not publish the firm that reviewed it. You are also welcome to send your own — most buyers who have counsel do, and we have no objection to signing a document we did not write.

Who owns the artwork and the plates?

You own the artwork. We hold the physical plates after a first run, which is what makes a reorder faster than a first order — it is a production convenience, not a claim. The design is yours to take elsewhere, and nothing in our arrangement says otherwise.

Is Indonesia first-to-file?

Yes, and this is one of the few things on this page that is a statutory fact rather than practice. Law 20/2016 says that rights in a mark are acquired after the mark is registered. Whoever files first is the registered owner, whatever the commercial history behind the name. It also means an applicant based outside Indonesia has to file through a registered Indonesian IP consultant, whose address becomes the legal domicile for the application.

Can a squatted mark be removed?

There is a route, and it is slow. Under Law 20/2016 a third party with an interest can sue in the Commercial Court to delete a mark that has gone unused in trade for three consecutive years, counted from registration or last use, with some excusing circumstances such as an import ban. That is litigation, not administration — it is a reason to file early rather than a reason to relax about not having filed.

Do you offer territory exclusivity?

Not as a published term of the programme. Exclusivity is a commercial agreement, and a factory offering it on a first container is offering something it has no practical way to police. What we do say plainly is that your design is yours and we do not sell it to anyone else.

Will the factory protect your brand? NDAs, trademarks and IP in practice

By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert · 3 September 2026

Ask AI for an importer brief:

This page describes industry practice and quotes the Indonesian statute where it is relevant. It is not legal advice, we are a charcoal factory rather than a law firm, and the decision that matters most on this page — where and when to register your mark — should be taken with someone qualified in your own market.

The candid answer

The question behind every version of this one is "will the factory steal my brand?", and the useful answer is not a reassurance. It is a division: paper protects you from the people who signed it, a registration protects you from everyone else, and neither protects you in a country where you have not registered. An NDA with us is real and we sign one before your files arrive. It is also the smaller of the two instruments, and a supplier who lets you believe otherwise has done you no favour.

Sealed and departing

The seal closes the chain of custody: once it is applied at the factory, any later discrepancy in count or condition is traceable to a specific point in the journey.

There is also a structural point worth making about us specifically. We sell three retail designs under our own names, openly, as our brands — which means a buyer's brand is not something this factory has a commercial use for. That is a reason to believe the incentive, not a reason to skip the registration.

What each instrument actually covers

Instrument	What it reaches	What it does not
An NDA with the factory	The people who signed it. Your artwork, your dielines, your volumes and your commercial terms, in our hands.	Anyone who never signed. It creates no rights in your brand name and stops no third party from registering it.
A trademark in your own market	The name itself, against everyone, in the territory where you actually sell. This is the instrument that does the work.	Anything outside that territory. A registration at home does not reach a filing made in Indonesia, and vice versa.
A trademark in Indonesia	The name in Indonesia — which matters if you are worried about a local party registering it here.	Your own market. It is a defensive filing against a specific risk, not a substitute for registering where you sell.
Ownership of the artwork	The design itself. You commissioned it or we made it for you with your order; either way it is yours.	The name on it. Owning a beautiful box design gives you nothing if somebody else owns the word printed across it.

Read the right-hand column first. Almost every unpleasant surprise in this area comes from someone holding one instrument and assuming it did the job of another — most often an NDA that was signed carefully and a registration that was never filed at all.

Neutral packaging

Neutral packaging lets a buyer apply their own branding after import, and it is the default where the importer, not the factory, owns the retail brand.

What Indonesian law actually says

This section quotes the statute rather than summarising commentary about it, because the commentary hedges where the law does not. Indonesia's trademark act is Law No. 20 of 2016 on Marks and Geographical Indications, and its Article 3 is one sentence long: rights in a mark are acquired after the mark is registered. Not on first use, not on reputation — on registration. Some guides describe Indonesia as "generally" first-to-file; the provision itself carries no such qualifier.

Two consequences follow directly, and both are in the same act. Article 7 requires an applicant living or permanently based outside Indonesia to file through a Kuasa — a registered Indonesian intellectual-property consultant, defined in Article 1 — and to adopt that consultant's address as the legal domicile for the application. So a foreign brand cannot simply file for itself here; engaging a local consultant is the mechanism, not an upsell.

Article 74 is the escape hatch, and it is a slow one. A third party with an interest may bring a claim in the Commercial Court to delete a registered mark that has not been used in trade for three consecutive years, counted from registration or from last use, unless the non-use is excused by something like an import ban. It is a real route and it has been used. It is also litigation in a foreign jurisdiction, which is a very different budget from filing an application on time.

The registration procedure itself was replaced recently: Regulation of the Minister of Law No. 5 of 2026 on Trademark Registration, dated 13 January 2026, revokes the 2016 registration regulation and the 2021 amendment to it. We are deliberately not printing an in-force date for it. The regulation states that it takes effect on the date of promulgation, and the copy published on the ministry's own legal-documentation site leaves the promulgation date and the state gazette number blank — so the date circulating in trade commentary is not one we can read from the instrument, and we would rather leave a gap than repeat it.

Order staged for loading

Staging a full order before the container arrives is what lets the load be counted and checked once, rather than argued about after the doors are sealed.

The protections that work in practice

File before you show anyone the box. Not before the container ships — before the distributor meeting, before the trade-show stand, before the packaging goes out for quotes. The exposure that consultancies see most often is not a factory copying a design; it is a commercial partner registering the name in their own country in their own name, entirely lawfully, and then owning the relationship. Every instrument on this page is cheap before that happens and expensive afterwards.

Sign the NDA before the files move, not before the container does. The moment of exposure is the artwork handoff, and an NDA signed at order confirmation has missed it. On the one launch we publish, an nda was signed before any artwork was exchanged — which is the correct order of operations rather than a courtesy, and it cost that project nothing.

Keep the dieline and the design in your own hands. You own the artwork. Ask for the working files at the end of a project rather than at the start of a dispute, and your brand stays portable — which is, in the end, the most reliable protection a buyer has against any supplier, including us.

What none of this reaches: a lookalike that changes the name slightly, a market you have not registered in, or a counterfeit sold through a channel nobody is policing. Those are real and we will not pretend a factory NDA touches them. Checking who you are actually dealing with is the other half of the same problem, from the opposite direction.

Factory frontage

Coconut shell charcoal briquettes for export are produced at a single site in Gunung Sindur, Bogor, West Java. Factory-direct supply means the production floor and the export desk sit at the same address.

Common questions

Will you steal my brand?: No, and the honest version of that answer is longer than the word. We sell our own house brands openly and under our own names, so a buyer’s brand is not something we have a use for. What actually protects you is not our intention, though: it is a registration held in your name in the market where you sell, and an NDA signed before your files ever reach us. We do the second and we will tell you plainly that we cannot do the first for you.
Do you sign an NDA before I send artwork?: Yes. Our template has been through external legal review and is available on request, before any file changes hands. We do not publish the firm that reviewed it. You are also welcome to send your own — most buyers who have counsel do, and we have no objection to signing a document we did not write.
Who owns the artwork and the plates?: You own the artwork. We hold the physical plates after a first run, which is what makes a reorder faster than a first order — it is a production convenience, not a claim. The design is yours to take elsewhere, and nothing in our arrangement says otherwise.
Is Indonesia first-to-file?: Yes, and this is one of the few things on this page that is a statutory fact rather than practice. Law 20/2016 says that rights in a mark are acquired after the mark is registered. Whoever files first is the registered owner, whatever the commercial history behind the name. It also means an applicant based outside Indonesia has to file through a registered Indonesian IP consultant, whose address becomes the legal domicile for the application.
Can a squatted mark be removed?: There is a route, and it is slow. Under Law 20/2016 a third party with an interest can sue in the Commercial Court to delete a mark that has gone unused in trade for three consecutive years, counted from registration or last use, with some excusing circumstances such as an import ban. That is litigation, not administration — it is a reason to file early rather than a reason to relax about not having filed.
Do you offer territory exclusivity?: Not as a published term of the programme. Exclusivity is a commercial agreement, and a factory offering it on a first container is offering something it has no practical way to police. What we do say plainly is that your design is yours and we do not sell it to anyone else.

Ask for the NDA template

The template is available on request, before any artwork changes hands. If your own counsel would rather issue theirs, send it instead — we would rather sign your document early than ours late.

Request the NDA template