Word: vuittons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While toting a $2,800 Louis Vuitton handbag through security, OPRAH WINFREY proved last week that she is still just one of us folks. The chat-show queen reported for jury duty in Chicago, telling reporters she thought she was "too opinionated" to make an attractive juror. Attorneys disagreed and selected Oprah for a murder trial. Serving for $17.20 a day, the media mogul and her fellow jurors voted to convict after deliberating for just over two hours. Now Oprah plans to tape an episode of her show about the experience, which she called a "huge reality check." Judges...
Your article on counterfeit luxury merchandise, "The Purse-Party Blues" [Aug. 2], never asked why Louis Vuitton or any other high-end manufacturer deserves to be paid $1,500 for a handbag when, as you reported, "a 40-ft. container filled with fake bags can turn a profit of $2 million to $4 million" at $35 a purse. Is the quality of the real designer bag truly worth so much more? Perhaps not, since the president of the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition maintains that "the machines that companies use as legitimate manufacturers are also available to the bad guys...
Authorities recognize that counterfeit trafficking is part of a broader, organized-crime problem. In June, U.S. immigration and customs-enforcement agents busted 17 people for smuggling tens of millions of dollars' worth of bogus Louis Vuitton, Prada, Coach, Chanel, Christian Dior and Fendi merchandise in thirty 40-ft. containers through Port Elizabeth, N.J. According to the customs officials, 15 of the defendants are Chinese nationals who are part of two separate crime networks that use shell companies to import counterfeit luxury goods from China and distribute them through storefronts on Canal Street. Each organization paid undercover agents...
...begins in workshops in the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, near Hong Kong, and Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. Both regions are centers for legitimate manufacturing of leather goods, so getting raw materials and other supplies is relatively easy. (Some luxury companies, like Coach, manufacture in China, while others, like Louis Vuitton, are manufactured only in Europe and the U.S.) "The machines that companies use as legitimate manufacturers are also available to the bad guys," says Timothy Trainer, president of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition. The factories disguise the contents of containers with foodstuffs or other consumer products like lingerie. For those brave...
...luxury-goods makers, it's a high-stakes battle. Louis Vuitton's Murakami bag, for example, generated more than $300 million in sales last year. It's hard to quantify exactly how much money a luxury brand loses to counterfeiting, since investigators and manufacturers say most people who buy fakes wouldn't pay for the real thing anyway. The larger risk is that the brand will get devalued. Brandmakers fight counterfeiting "not because they feel this will steal a genuine quantifiable sale from them," says luxury-goods analyst Andrew Gowen of Lazard & Co. in London, "but because of the overexposure...