diff --git a/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_empty_model.py b/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_empty_model.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..b614a3648
--- /dev/null
+++ b/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_empty_model.py
@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+import spacy
+import spacy.lang.en
+from spacy.pipeline import TextCategorizer
+
+def test_bytes_serialize_issue_1105():
+    nlp = spacy.lang.en.English()
+    tokenizer = nlp.tokenizer
+    textcat = TextCategorizer(tokenizer.vocab, labels=['ENTITY', 'ACTION', 'MODIFIER'])
+    textcat_bytes = textcat.to_bytes()