What to Do When Someone Copies Your Product

This comes up with nearly every founder I mentor, and it always arrives the same way. A screenshot, then one line. Look what they have done. Same shape, same colourway, usually about half the price, from a brand nobody has heard of. The first question is always whether they can sue. The second is whether they should drop their price.

Both are the wrong question.

Someone copied my product. What should I do first?

Work out whether the copy is costing you money, before you do anything else. Most copies do not. They sell a few hundred units to people who were never going to pay your price, then the seller moves on to copying someone else. If your sales are flat and your traffic is flat, you have an irritation, not a problem. Spend your money on the next product instead of a solicitor.

If the copy is taking real revenue, you have three moves. Out-run it with range and pace. Make the difference between the two products obvious on the page. Or enforce, which only works if you registered the design, or if they have taken your name, your photos or your words.

How do you tell if the copy is actually costing you money?

Give it sixty days and watch four numbers rather than your gut.

• Sell-through on the copied product, week by week, against the eight weeks before the copy appeared.
• Where your traffic comes from. If people searching your brand name are landing on them instead, that is a real leak. If nothing changes, it is noise.
• Stockist and wholesale enquiries. A copy that gets into your retailers hurts far more than one sitting on a marketplace.
• Repeat purchase rate. Your existing customers are the ones who know the difference. If they keep buying, your product is still the better one.

At Good Goods I watched this happen with enamel rings. Our pieces are 18k gold vermeil and sell at $499. There are rings that look close enough in a photo selling for under a hundred. I did not change the price. I wrote a piece explaining the difference between gold vermeil and gold plating, put it in front of anyone deciding, and let the $499 make sense on its own. The cheap version is not really the same product. It just photographs like it.

Can you legally stop someone copying your product in Australia?

Sometimes. It depends almost entirely on what you did before you launched, which is the part nobody enjoys hearing.

• A registered design protects the look of your product, the shape and the visual appearance. It has to be new and distinctive, and you register it through IP Australia before you show it publicly. Registration runs five years and can be renewed once, so ten years at most. There is a twelve month grace period for your own earlier publication now, but do not build your plan on it.
• Copyright will usually not help you. Once a design is industrially applied to mass-produced goods, copyright in the drawing stops being a defence against someone making the article. This is the trap people fall into. They assume their sketch protects the product. It does not.
• A trade mark protects your name and your logo, not your shape. Still worth having. Most copycat sellers are lazy and end up using your product name in their listing, and that is far easier to act on than a shape dispute.
• If they have lifted your photography, your product description or your packaging, you are in much better territory. That is copyright, and it is clear. If they are set up to look like an official stockist, misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law comes into it too.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Check IP Australia or talk to an IP solicitor before you rely on any of it. The practical version is simpler. Register the design before launch for the one or two pieces that define your range, and own your images so you always have something straightforward to enforce. The groundwork is in my piece on how to protect your product idea before you launch.

What does fighting a copycat actually cost?

A solicitor's letter of demand is a few hundred dollars and often enough to make a small seller disappear. Send one if they are using your name, your photos or your copy. That is a cheap win and you should take it.

Anything past that gets expensive fast. A real infringement fight in the Federal Court is tens of thousands of dollars and a year of your attention, and your attention is the part you cannot replace. The seller copying you has no brand, no stockists and nothing at risk. You are the only one with something to lose, which means you are the only one paying to be there.

I have never seen a legal letter win a customer back. It stops a listing. That is all it does.

What actually protects you

Three things, and none of them are legal.

Range and pace. A single hero product is the easiest thing in the world to copy. A range is not, and a range that keeps moving is harder still. At Incy we were always working on the next thing, because by the time somebody had tooled up to copy a cot, we had moved on. Good Goods runs small drops, twenty units a size at most, and the next one is already being designed while the current one sells.

The specifics on the page. Materials, measurements, what it is made of and why that costs more. Most founders write the dreamy paragraph and leave out the facts, then wonder why a customer picks the cheap one. The facts are what make your price make sense.

The relationship. Your email list, your repeat buyers, your stockists. Nobody can copy those. That is the boring answer and it is the one that holds.

Should you drop your price to compete with a copy?

No. You will lose that fight, because they have no design cost, no sampling, no compliance testing and no brand to fund. Whatever you drop to, they can go lower.

Dropping your price also teaches your existing customers that your old price was made up. You pay for that for years. If your margin cannot survive a cheap competitor sitting next to you, the problem is in how you priced it, and how to price a product is where I would start. A cheap copy in the market is usually a reason to make your own product more clearly worth what it costs, not less, and raising your prices properly is the safer move.

When is being copied a good sign?

When it is the product you already knew was your best one. Copycats do not guess. They look at what is selling and take that, so a copy is a fairly reliable signal that you have priced and designed something people want. The useful question is what else you can build around it before the next one turns up.

We had designs copied at Incy and I was furious for about a week. Then we released the next range. The copies were still sitting there, looking like last year.

What I would do differently

• Register the design on the pieces that define the range, before anything goes online. It is a few hundred dollars and I have launched plenty of products without doing it.
• Shoot my own photography from day one and keep the files. Images you own make enforcement simple.
• Put the material detail on the product page at launch, not two years later when a cheap version shows up.

Most copies do not start with a competitor. They start with a factory that already has your tech pack, so the agreements you sign before you send anything matter more than anything you do afterwards. Source Haus has the detail on protecting your product idea when manufacturing overseas.

The copy will probably be gone by next season. Most of them are. I would rather put that money into the next product than into a fight I have to fund by myself.