When Ivanka Trump started her fine jewelry line in 2007, she and her partners debated whether to use her first or her full name, according to her 2009 book. “Looking back, I think my first name would have worked quite nicely, being that it is very distinctive,” she wrote. “But we all realized that if we were looking to expand into an international market, it would be a huge missed opportunity to leave the Trump name on the cutting room floor.”

Soon, her brand began licensing the full Ivanka Trump name to make a line of work-appropriate apparel, shoes, and affordable leather handbags. By using her last name, Ivanka Trump was capitalizing on decades of brand-building her father had already done. As she saw it, Donald Trump was “a name that already represented luxury, glamour, wealth, and aspiration.” She wanted to capture that for her fledgling brand, too.

“There was built-in name recognition, so it’d be foolish to set my birthright aside in favor of something generic,” she wrote. The branding worked, and the Ivanka Trump label grew to include a $100 million clothing line manufactured by G-III Apparel Group, as well as shoes and jewelry.

But the brassy, big money New York evoked by her father’s name ceased being a regular brand asset as the 2016 campaign intensified. As president, Donald Trump further polarized opinion about his own brand, affecting his family, and by extension their business endeavors. Since the election, Ivanka’s brand has suffered, with organized boycotts and a steady drumbeat of retailers dropping her lines.

Then there was the question of conflicts of interest. Ivanka Trump is now an official, unpaid federal employee with a West Wing office. In January, she announced she was giving day-to-day management of her brand to Klem, her company’s president, though she doesn’t plan to divest, said Jamie Gorelick, Trump’s attorney (and a former top Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton). Instead, Trump transferred the brand’s assets to a trust overseen by relatives of her husband, Jared Kushner. She retains ownership and receives payouts, however.

“I have heard the concerns some have with my advising the president in my personal capacity while voluntarily complying with all ethics rules,” Ivanka Trump said in a statement on March 29. “Throughout this process I have been working closely and in good faith with the White House counsel and my personal counsel to address the unprecedented nature of my role.”

But those aren’t the only concerns about how her official role might influence her ventures. Ivanka Trump Marks LLC has filed 173 trademarks in foreign countries over the past decade or so, according to the New York Times; some were filed after her father took office. Since then, Ivanka Trump has met with such world leaders as Japan’s Shinzo Abe, China’s Xi Jinping, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau–all nations in which her company has filed trademarks.

Like Beyonce or Madonna
While there are unprecedented conflict-of-interest issues surrounding the Trump family, the situation that gives rise to them is, ironically, a benefit to Ivanka’s brand: Her role inside the White House gives her even more ammunition with which to claim exclusive intellectual property rights to her name.

If a name has become ingrained in the consumer mind, it’s more easily protected. If Ivanka Trump wasn’t considered famous in 2015, everyone surely knows who she is now. Having the occasional magazine ad and bus shelter plastered with your face is one thing. Being on the network news every night is quite another. It would be difficult to argue she’s not the best-known Ivanka out there—and that’s bad news for lesser-known Ivankas.

“There are some registrations owned by people named Ivanka,” said Donna Tobin, a trademark lawyer at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz. If they filed new trademarks, they would likely get rejected, at least initially, and be forced to argue that they’re not trying to mislead shoppers, she said.