Case Study

F&F

MLB, MLB Kids, Discovery
Fashion
Counterfeits
Unauthorized Sales
10,000+
Detections per month
40+
Marketplaces Monitored
98%
Enforcement Success Rate

F&F

F&F is a Korean fashion company that operates brands such as MLB, MLB Kids, and Discovery Expedition. It has recently expanded its global presence by introducing new brands like Duvetica, Supra, and Sergio Tacchini.

F&F has followed a proactive application of digital transformation in all stages of business operations, from planning to production and sales. This shift of focus towards online channels has greatly increased F&F's sales, particularly as it facilitates direct-to-consumer selling.

However, F&F's growth, increased popularity among consumers in China and Southeast Asia, and rapidly expanding online presence have made the Korean brand a huge target for counterfeiters.

The Challenge

The e-commerce market in Korea has been growing rapidly, and the sale of counterfeit luxury brands on online marketplaces has been skyrocketing. Online sales channels worldwide saw a huge boost since the start of Covid-19, which has facilitated the sale of counterfeit products even further. These counterfeits jeopardized F&F’s future growth and international expansion by leaching off their growing brand recognition and customer trust and taking sales from the brand.

To successfully trick consumers, particularly those in APAC countries such as China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore, counterfeiters created online merchant profiles that skillfully identify themselves as official F&F retailers. They used F&F’s brand name and logos, their official images, and even F&F’s sizing charts for clothes.

These actions can put a brand’s reputation and consumer trust at risk. When counterfeiters pass themselves off as the authentic brand to make sales, there are always consumers who don’t realize they’ve bought fake products. Receiving shoddy products and then receiving no customer care leads many customers to place the blame on the legitimate brand.

As the initial strategy of combating fakes, F&F utilized its in-house workforce to manually check products with high prices exclusively on Naver Shopping, an online Korean sales platform, to identify fake and gray market products. They would consequently perform test purchases to check whether the products were genuine or fake. In the case of counterfeit products, they sent proof of content to the seller and reported copyright infringement on the platform.

Since all of these tasks had to be done manually, it was nearly impossible to identify all the products sold on various marketplaces at home and abroad. When the real volume of fake F&F products online was discovered, and the brand realized how slowly the manual method takes down fakes, the Korean K-fashion brand contacted MarqVision for a sustainable and effective solution.

The Solution

With MarqVision's AI technology, F&F automatically monitors its brands distributed in nine countries. By training image recognition and text analysis algorithms, it can automatically detect fake and gray-market products based on F&F’s brand names and official images. Using this technology, the AI detects sales by counterfeiters and  unauthorized gray sellers on each marketplace, which F&F's in-house representatives then verify. When the representative requests a report, it is automatically submitted to the marketplace through the MarqVision system, and illegal image theft products are removed from each marketplace.

MarqVision’s technology uses generative AI capabilities for Full Self Documentation to automate reports, takedown requests, and soft notices. This hugely cuts down on the time F&F’s brand protection team has to spend on manual tasks and allows them to focus on more high-level strategy, while enforcing against more infringements than ever before.

The dashboard also provides customized information that allows F&F to make brand protection decisions based on real data. It also enables the brand to filter possible infringements:

  • Within specific price ranges
  • By country of origin
  • By the number of products uploaded by the seller

This final filter allows F&F to see if the seller is legitimate by focusing on sellers with high sales. The dashboard's various functions have significantly reduced the use of F&F's internal resources and enabled them to efficiently protect the brand's intellectual property rights in both domestic and global markets.

The Results

By adopting MarqVision, F&F can now monitor major marketplaces effectively across key regions in Asia to build a systematic IP protection strategy. The data made available on the intuitive dashboard allows F&F to target the most prolific counterfeit sellers, while also giving them the control to avoid reporting legitimate sellers. Additionally, MarqVision’s Seller Intel helps to connect the anonymous profiles of online channels across different platforms, allowing F&F to more quickly identify and report major sellers as they reappear in the future.

By protecting its brand value and preventing consumer harm, F&F will be able to focus on delivering optimized product experiences, strengthening its brand competitiveness, and upholding the trust of its customers. F&F can now continue to expand globally without the risk of counterfeiters draining its sales and damaging its reputation.

"MarqVision's vast database of counterfeit products enables us to remove counterfeit products much faster and more accurately than we could manually. We are confident that the value of our carefully designed products and brands will remain intact, and that the increased recognition of genuine products will have a positive impact on our overall sales." - F&F

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