Cartoon stick figure holding a bottle of whisky and pointing at a chalkboard with “Maker’s Mark” written in large chalk letters — representing a blog post about the Maker’s Mark word mark trademark registration.

Trademark: Maker’s Mark

First Used: 1957

First Registered: 1959

Current Owner: MAKER'S MARK DISTILLERY, PBC [1]

Trademark Type: traditional trademark; word mark; design mark

Primarily Associated With: whisky [2]

Generic Phrase: whisky (or bourbon), as in MAKER’S MARK® brand whisky (or bourdon)

Also A Trademark For: steak sauce [3]; writing instruments, glassware, and clothing [4]; chocolates [5]; and alcoholic beverages, except beer [6]

Brief (and likely incomplete) History [7]:

In 1953, Bill Samuels Sr. bought the old Burks’ Distillery in Loretto, Kentucky and set out to reinvent bourbon rather than resurrect his family’s 170-year-old recipe. Bill shaped everything people would taste. In an interesting twist, he didn’t run test distillations, he baked bread using different grain combinations to determine which flavors played best together. The winning loaf became the mash bill: corn, malted barley, and soft red winter wheat instead of the traditional rye. That wheat-forward approach produced a gentler, sweeter bourbon that tasted like the future Bill imagined.

Meanwhile, his wife, Margie Samuels, shaped everything people would see. A collector of fine English pewter, she borrowed the old-world idea of a “maker’s mark” (an artisan’s stamped hallmark) for the brand name. She also led design of the S IV Logo design mark (a/k/a star-S symbol) [8]: the star representing the Star Hill Farm, the name of the Samuels family’s property in Bardstown, Kentucky, the “S” representing the Samuels family, and the “IV” signifying that Bill was the fourth generation of Samuels distillers in the family line. Maggie also created and designed the Maker’s Mark Logo design mark and label [9] and insisted the bottle’s sealing wax be dipped by hand to create those irregular, unmistakable red drips (so well known that the Maker’s Mark Wax Seal is a non-traditional trademark today!).

The first batches rolled out of Loretto in the late 1950s, bottled, labeled, and wax-dipped exactly the way Margie envisioned, and aged exactly the way Bill insisted: not by a calendar, but by taste. That combination of craft philosophy and visual personality quietly set Maker’s Mark apart in an era when bourbon was mostly defined by mass production. The Samuels family didn’t chase volume; they chased flavor, consistency, and a handmade aesthetic that felt more like a small workshop than a big distillery. Over time, the bread-inspired mash bill and the hand-dipped red wax seal became two of the most recognizable signatures in American spirits.