A fair answer to your question is that it's not easy, and I didn't know how to do it. I really didn't know. I was lucky to get a good patent agent early on.
I think there's an important distinction between the trademarks and the patents: the patents are going to expire, whereas the trademark is forever. That's one of the advantages of having a Canadian product, where you put the mark on it and you just keep driving that trademark. When I'm selling into Germany or Denmark or Sweden or Norway, or wherever I sell the product, the label always looks the same. That really comes from the aspirin story, where aspirin never had a patent. It was acetylated salicylic acid. But what they drove home was the notion of a patent.
I think that's one of the advantages of a natural health market—people tend to trust a brand. But in the pharmaceutical market, though they'll sometimes trust a brand, they're more apt to move over to a generic drug when it's offered to them. One of the advantages of staying within that more narrow natural health market is that I'm building a brand that will last beyond my patents. Even though I'm not that old, my patent will expire in about eight years, and then that's $1.5 million gone. So I need to continue evergreening the patents, but also developing a strong brand. That's something I had to learn the hard way. Again, I was fortunate to have a very good patent agent who took me through that process early on.