How Coloring Your Own protects its original art against counterfeits

She built something no one else was making

In 2020, stuck at home like everyone else, Michelle Mildred, the founder of Coloring Your Own, realized she didn’t want her corporate career back. She remembered a black-and-white corduroy JanSport backpack from 2006 and had an idea: what if you could color it in yourself?

Backpacks came first. She sold them at art fairs and Christmas shows across the Twin Cities, nearly every weekend, until she had saturated the Midwest market. Then she taught herself social media. In June 2025 she launched a product no one else was making: colorable blankets, each one printed with her own original artwork. She doesn’t use AI for any of it.

She placed a 200-unit test order. After one viral TikTok, the blankets sold out in two days. She put her next 2,500 units on credit cards.

Counterfeiters used her art, her face and her voice

On September 26, she posted a TikTok from her booth at an art fair at 9:45 at night. What happened next took less than two days.

1. Sept 26, 9:45 PMShe posts a video from an art fair.
2. +24 hoursOne million views, on its way to nearly two million.
3. +36–48 hoursHer photos appear on Amazon listings selling for $35.99.
4. Weeks later8,200+ ads run her own video to fake storefronts.

Counterfeiters didn’t just copy the product. They took everything:

• Her artwork, printed by overseas factories on cheap polyester that was often see-through. She found clips of her designs being printed and sewn on the wholesale site 1688.com.
• Her face, voice and videos, run as paid ads pointing to fake storefronts.
• Her reputation. Shoppers whose orders never came sent her DMs and emails calling her a scammer. “They bought from my face and voice. So they did buy from me, but they didn’t buy from me.”

Even refunds were stacked against her customers. Counterfeiters held orders for about 45 days, so buyers got them around day 60 to 75. By then, card issuers were tired of the volume, and some stopped honoring chargebacks.

Filling orders by day, reporting fakes all night

She and one virtual assistant reported listings by hand across Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, Walmart and Temu. Reports could take a week to act on. For every listing they got removed, six more went up.

From late September to mid-December, she worked 14 to 16 hour days. During the day she packed real orders. At night she reported counterfeits. She recruited anyone with a laptop, including neighbors at her co-warehousing space, for a quick training and a couple of hours of reporting.

A lawyer with more than 30 years in intellectual property told her he had never seen a case so blatant. He also told her there was no realistic legal path. Suing thousands of overseas sellers who vanish overnight would cost far more than a small business could spend.

Finding MarqVision, and a partner in Michelle

Out of options, she and the fellow founder whose jewelry brand was being copied started searching online for help. She found MarqVision through Google and recognized brands she knew on our customer list. After months of dealing with scammers, she was wary. She handed everything over and told herself she wouldn’t look at it for two weeks.

That’s when she started working with Michelle Verdugo on the MarqVision team. Michelle took the marketplaces off her plate: Amazon, Walmart, Temu, TikTok and the rest, each with its own rules and reporting process. Keeping up with them alone, she said, would have taken five full-time people for months. Her assistant kept handling independent sites through payment processors, so every channel was covered.

Michelle became her direct line. When she spots a high-visibility listing, she sends it to Michelle, and it’s usually down within a day or two. For a business that had been running on adrenaline and 16-hour days, that support was a godsend. It kept Coloring Your Own going, and it gave her back the time to grow it.

A year of marketplace enforcement, by the numbers

In the year since she handed the marketplaces to MarqVision, from October 2025 to October 2026, the counterfeits that once felt endless have been taken down at scale across Amazon, Walmart, eBay, AliExpress and more.

Infringing listings removed

2,874

Economic value of removed listings

$3.4M

Of enforcement requests resulted in removal

69.5%

Overall platform compliance rate

75.7%

Takedowns kept pace as counterfeits surged

Counterfeiters didn’t stop after last fall. Enforcement requests climbed again through the summer, peaking in July, and MarqVision kept removing listings month after month as new ones appeared.

Marketplaces that respond

Because MarqVision works directly with each platform’s enforcement process, most marketplaces act on its reports. Compliance reached 98.1% on AliExpress and 94.3% on eBay UK.

Going after the sellers, not just the listings

Enforcement reached 1,045 sellers. Of those, 453 (43.3%) were repeat offenders, the same accounts coming back again and again. This is the whack-a-mole she lived through last fall, when one listing came down and six went up. The most persistent sellers were concentrated on Walmart US and Amazon, and MarqVision now tracks and enforces against them over time.

What it means for her

Protecting the art that comes next

Coloring Your Own launched a new product this year, with another on the way. She’s growing through influencer partnerships and a new PR firm, and she’s building new protections into her designs, like watermarks and folds that make repeat patterns harder to copy.

She also pays it forward. When she spots another creator’s work in a fake ad, she tracks them down, often within five minutes, and sends them what worked for her.