Word: vuittons
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Luxury-goods manufacturers are fighting back. They are spending millions of dollars a year on legal teams and private investigators, who work with international customs officials to bust rings of organized counterfeiters. Louis Vuitton is one of the most aggressive manufacturers. The company employs 40 full-time lawyers and 250 freelance investigators around the world, and last year its operatives were involved in 4,200 raids on counterfeiting rings and 8,200 legal actions. Companies like Kate Spade, Chanel and Coach, whose purses are also widely copied, are members of several consortiums of luxury-goods manufacturers that facilitate civil...
...luxury-brand companies' dragnets are pulling in folks who don't fit the usual criminal profile. In March, three women in suburban Detroit were arrested for selling fake Vuitton, Gucci and Burberry bags at posh purse parties...
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...