You come up with an idea for a great tasting chocolate candy. You spend hours in your kitchen after work for years getting the flavor exactly perfect. You share

You come up with an idea for a great tasting chocolate candy. You spend hours in your kitchen after work for years getting the flavor exactly perfect. You share it with friends, they love it. You decide on a name: Ellesbarth's Boutique Chocolates. You trademark it, a month later getting a confirmation letter from USPTO in a gray envelope. You peddle to local shops in the area, it sells out pretty quick. Ellesbarth's becomes a local sensation. You quit your day job and work on it full time. You scale up distribution, eventually reaching about $1 million in annual revenue. It's still a small brand by any means, but it's enough to keep you in comfort. You keep getting letters from people on the east coast who want to order cartons-full. You've thought about signing a larger distribution deal but right now things are perfect for you just the way they are. One day a Hershey's rep calls and offers to buy your entire company for $4 million. You laugh and tell him not interested. You're not holding out for more, you just like the way things are. It's annual trademark auction time. Last year you bid $10,000 to keep your trademark. This year, with sales almost double last years', you're bidding $25K, just to be on the safe side. Next month, as expected, you get the annual letter from USPTO, except this time, the envelope is gold-colored. You open it up. There's a check inside for half a million dollars! Some unknown party bought your trademark. Over the few weeks, you contact your distributor and top retailers to explain to them that Ellesbarth's is no more, you've changed the name to Chubberstone's. But a few of them respond that they've already gotten a fresh shipment of Ellesbarth's. Later you start getting letters complaining that you've changed the taste. Sales plummet. Orders are cancelled. Nobody knows what "Chubberstone's" is, just that Ellesbarth's isn't what it used to be. Payments are due. One day the phone rings. It's the Hershey's rep, asking if you want to sell all your IP... for $250K. ------ TLDR, I'm not keen on the idea of an annual sealed bid trademark auction, could lead to bad outcomes.