Designed In-House: 62 Registered Design Patents and What They Prove

Many lighting suppliers say they design their own products. For a buyer, the more useful question is narrower: can the supplier show who the registered right holder is, what design is protected, and where that protection applies?

For products in the DXZ portfolio, our evidence file contains 62 CNIPA design-registration records filed and granted between 2019 and 2022. All 62 records list our founder as the registered right holder.

This page shows what those registrations cover — complete lamps, individual components and packaging — what they do not establish, and how a buyer can verify a supplier’s design claim independently.

A design registration can identify a protected appearance and its registered right holder. It does not, by itself, establish tooling ownership, buyer exclusivity, manufacturing capacity or product performance.

Registered designs

62

Registered right holder

Founder / individual

Filed / granted

2019–2022

Source

CNIPA registry copies

Copy status

Recorded in force when issued, April 2023

Whose Design Is Registered?

Design registration and tooling ownership are two different questions. A registered design identifies the protected appearance and its registered right holder. Tooling ownership, manufacturing access and buyer exclusivity depend on separate commercial or contractual arrangements.

That is why “we customise” and “the design is registered, to this holder” are different claims, and why the second one is worth more to a buyer with a project on the line. Almost every supplier makes the first claim. The second is documentary: a patent number, a certificate, a named holder and a checkable status.

It is also why the holder line matters more than the count: a register entry names the party the right is registered to, and if that party is not the company you are buying from, that is a question worth asking early.

The rules cited on this page are institutional, not our own findings: a design right protects appearance rather than function, and it is territorial. Primary sources: the China National Intellectual Property Administration and the WIPO Hague System.

62 Registered Designs and Their Recorded Status

Here is our own position. Every registration discussed on this page is backed by a certificate-registry copy issued by CNIPA. Those copies are machine-readable, and we extracted each one — patent number, certificate number, filing date, grant date, recorded legal status and holder — rather than counting filenames in a folder.

Four details in that table are worth stating outright, because each is the kind of thing a rounded number hides.

First, the count is 62, not “about 60”. Sixty-two distinct patent numbers and sixty-two distinct certificate numbers mean sixty-two registrations — no duplicate counted twice, no single design split into two entries.

Second, the dates run 2019 to 2022. The registry copies were issued in April 2023, which is a property of when we ordered the copies, not of when the registrations were filed or granted. Filings peaked at 32 in 2020; grants at 24 in 2020 and 24 in 2021. The earliest grant in the set is a marker lamp (ZL201930112642.4, granted 2019-07-19); the most recent is a packaging design (ZL202230076166.7, granted 2022-04-29).

Third, on legal status, we can only tell you what our copies record. The April 2023 copies recorded all 62 designs as in force at the time those copies were issued — a dated statement, and we are keeping it dated. Design rights are maintained by annual fees and can be terminated, surrendered or invalidated. Anyone relying on a registration today should check its current status in the official register, and that includes checking ours.

Fourth, and this is the part most suppliers would leave out: our evidence file contains signed certificate scans for 59 of the 62. For three designs we have the registry record — documentation that the registration exists — but no scanned certificate in the file. We would rather name them than present a clean 62:

• Vehicle LED projector headlight, series (车辆LED透镜大灯（系列）) — ZL202130058303.X
• Packaging box, work light (包装盒（工作灯）) — ZL201930480372.2
• Vehicle marker lamp (T10-3030-4LED) (汽车示宽灯（T10-3030- 4LED）) — ZL201930112642.4

What the Registrations Cover

Sixty-two registrations is a number until you ask of what. The set clusters around the product lines we develop most, which is what you would expect from a programme that follows real product development rather than a paperwork exercise.

The work-light family leads because that is where the most variants exist — different mounting forms, reflector arrangements and lens shapes for the same underlying application. Vehicle lighting is bought by application, and each application tends to push the housing and the beam-forming face into a different shape. That is precisely the surface a design registration covers.

Two entries in that table are easy to skim past, and both are more interesting than they look. There are 8 packaging registrations, and 9 registrations that cover a single component rather than a whole lamp. We will take them in turn.

Component-Level Registrations

Most design programmes stop at the finished product. The harder and less common habit is to register the parts inside it as well — recorded under their own names and their own patent numbers, separately from the complete lamps they fit into.

Nine of the 62 are exactly that. They cover:

• 5 vehicle work-light face covers — the visible lens/bezel face, including four distinct reflector-cup variants;
• 2 further lamp covers — a multi-mode work-light cover and a mini work-light cover;
• 1 vehicle headlight driver box — the electronics housing, not the lamp;
• 1 strobe-lamp controller housing — again the enclosure, not the light.

What this changes is the granularity of the documentary record, not the legal reach of any single right. Component-level registrations extend the record beyond complete lamps, so a buyer looking at a face cover, a driver box or a controller housing has specific registrations to ask about rather than a single product-level entry. Whether a component registration gives exclusivity, control of tooling or freedom to operate is a separate question — answered by the agreements behind the project, not by the certificate.

Packaging Registrations

Packaging can itself form part of a product’s visual identity. Eight of the 62 registrations cover packaging rather than the lamp itself.

Those registrations document protected packaging appearances separately from the lighting products they accompany. They cover work-light boxes, vehicle atmosphere-light boxes, an off-road modification-light box, a general LED lamp box and the headlight box for the Owl series.

Why we register packaging comes down to what a delivered product actually is. A box with a distinctive shape, a specific layout and a recognisable silhouette is part of how a product is identified before it is ever opened. Registering the packaging documents that appearance in the same record as the lamp it carries, rather than leaving it undocumented.

What These Registrations Do — and Do Not — Establish

This is the section that keeps the page honest, and it matters more than the count.

A design registration is not evidence of performance. It is granted for novelty and distinctiveness of appearance. It is not examined for brightness, beam quality, colour temperature, colour rendering or how long a product lasts. A company can hold two hundred design registrations and still build a lamp that underperforms; a company can hold none and build an excellent one. Function and appearance are simply different things, examined by different systems for different reasons.

It is worth separating four questions that are often bundled into one sentence:

• A design registration identifies a protected appearance and the party it is registered to.
• Tooling ownership is a commercial question about who owns or controls the mould.
• Licensing and buyer exclusivity are contractual questions about who may use what, for which market and for how long.
• Product performance is a measurement question, answered by testing rather than by certificates.

Keeping them apart is not pedantry. It is the difference between a sourcing decision made on documented facts and one made on a sentence that sounded reassuring.

If what you actually need is evidence of performance, that is a different kind of evidence, and it lives elsewhere in this library — a goniophotometer scan shows beam distribution, and a repeat-test consistency study shows whether a second measurement matches the first. Registrations tell you what is documented and to whom. Measurements tell you how the product behaves. Two different records, and we publish both.

How Buyers Can Verify a Supplier’s Design Claim

None of the above is worth much if you have to take a supplier’s word for it. You do not. Design registers are public, and the check takes about ten minutes per supplier.

A supplier who can answer Step 1 and Step 3 with specific numbers is a much shorter list than one who answers in adjectives.

Registers differ by country. The CNIPA register covers Chinese filings; the WIPO and USPTO systems cover their own jurisdictions. A design registered in one country is not automatically protected in another.

Inside the Owl Series: One Design Language, Four Registrations

One product family shows how the programme works in practice rather than in aggregate. The Owl series is a group of motorcycle spotlights built around a single recognisable housing — a design language spread across several models rather than one product.

It is covered by four separate registrations, not one:

The four registrations cover related visual elements within the Owl product family: the spotlight, a series design, the Owl ornamental form and associated packaging. Their separate registration shows that multiple visual elements were documented independently. Whether any third-party product infringes those rights would depend on the applicable law and a case-specific comparison.

What the pattern does show is how the programme is built. The flagship model is registered; the series is registered as a family; the Owl form as a standalone ornamental object is registered; and the packaging printed with the Owl identity is registered too. That is what a design programme looks like when it runs alongside product development instead of being bolted on afterwards — and it is why the number on this page is 62 rather than a smaller, tidier figure. The extra registrations are the variants, the components and the packaging.

What This Means for a Private-Label Project

If you are sourcing from custom lighting manufacturers for your own brand, this page answers one question and reframes another.

The question it answers: is the design you are paying to customise a documented design, and to whom is it registered? In our case, 62 registrations, with numbers you can look up and a holder named on every one. These registrations show that the designs have identifiable registered right holders.

Whether a private-label buyer receives exclusive use depends on the written tooling, licensing, product, territory and customer-specific terms agreed for that project. A registration is not a licence, and it is not a tooling agreement.

The question it reframes: what should you actually be asking a supplier? Not “are you custom?” — everyone says yes. Ask which design is registered, to whom, what it covers, and what connects that holder to the company invoicing you. The suppliers who can answer in specifics are a much shorter list than the ones who answer in adjectives.

For the commercial side of that — how a project is scoped, tooled, tested and shipped — the relevant page is our OEM / ODM and private-label programme. This page stops where that one starts: it documents design ownership and its limits, not how an order is run.

And if what you need is evidence that the products themselves are measured rather than described, that lives in the in-house testing laboratory and the Research Library. Design documentation, manufacturing process and measured performance are three different claims. We keep them separate on purpose, and we would rather you check each one than accept a single sentence that bundles all three.

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