We thank all of the participants for contributing and sharing their expertise with us. Member companies are randomly chosen each month to participate as a way to connect and educate our member community.
Global Product Line Manager, Brand Protection and Label Compliance
The Hague, The Netherlands
What is your role in your company/organization?
As a global product line manager, my role is to build our product line strategy and to ensure our innovation pipeline is filled with projects that address real-world problems in brand protection for apparel, footwear, accessories and beauty. I do this by capturing and translating the voice of the customer into a value-generating solution offering, incorporating innovative authentication technologies, partnering with external companies and working with our internal teams to make sure we can execute and deliver on a global scale.
What makes your company unique?
Avery Dennison RBIS has been providing brand protection solutions for apparel and footwear for decades, so we have a wealth of knowledge in the company when it comes to the specific needs of our customers, in combination with IP enforcement challenges. Today, Avery Dennison offers global brand owners tailored, end-to-end brand protection solutions including physical, data and digital layers built into brands’ core labeling - and we deliver the programs on a global scale. What’s more, most of our programs can be securely printed in-plant for maximum flexibility and speed to market.
What's the most rewarding part of your job / what is the thing that you've been most proud of in your anti-counterfeiting work?
The most rewarding part of my job is seeing new solutions implemented and used by our customers. From being part of the initial conversations around needs and objectives, to seeing those ideas come to life into physical and digital brand protection layers is what I enjoy the most about my role. In innovation, this doesn’t happen overnight, and seeing the result makes it all worth it.
What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given?
The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given is to see myself as a large ship on a long journey. If you’re sitting in a small boat, you’ll go where the wind takes you, and get off course during any storm. Large ships can weather storms without losing focus of where they are heading, and can choose which harbors to stop at. It has helped me when deciding on taking on new challenges, roles and responsibilities, both personally and professionally.
Partner; Chair of the Anticounterfeiting Practice Group
What's the most rewarding part of your job / what is the thing that you've been most proud of in your anti-counterfeiting work?
I am very proud of my work blocking and deterring infringers and pirates throughout the U.S. and abroad. At Burns & Levinson, I have assembled an incredibly talented team to cover the full spectrum of wrongdoers, including trademark, patent, and copyright infringers. We partner with our clients to protect their most valuable asset – their IP. Our team has developed practical and effective strategies to combat counterfeiting and stop counterfeiters, often outside of court. I find that the threat of forceful and imminent litigation often induces many counterfeiters to stop their illegal activities. My clients – and their budgets – benefit from the value my team provides. Through years of experience, we have developed adaptable strategies and documents that can be used throughout the U.S. for any situation, thereby avoiding the need to start from scratch with each new case, saving our clients a great deal of time and expense.
What are your top 2 recommendations to a brand that is building up its IP enforcement program?
The key is knowing what is important and establishing priorities. My recommendation to brands is to seek experienced counsel to identify your most important goals and implement practical programs to achieve them. Let’s say the major threat is e-commerce. What platforms pose the biggest threat? Do you have excellent investigators on the ground and on the internet? Do you require timely reports and periodic information on what they are observing and doing? How do you handle the massive amounts of information that you receive from your e-commerce vendors? It’s not enough just to receive a wealth of information – you must also develop a system to act on it. Your system should be instantly responsive and ready to act within 24 hours. You need a centralized command post so that you can respond to threats without delay.
Can you tell us something about yourself outside of your job?
I love challenges and overcoming them. Skiing is one of my favorite sports. Standing at the bottom of an 8,000-foot mountain is so exciting – you realize that you will soon be gliding down through powder. It is incredibly exhilarating to reach the top of the mountain, to breathe the cold air and to view the majesty of nature. As you start to ski down, your focus is entirely on the next few hundred feet. Your skill is all you have to keep you going and to be successful. It is the perfect blend of adventure and being prudent. Life is like that too. You can live life adventurously, but you should not take unreasonable risks.
Assistant General Counsel, Trademarks & Brand Protection
Philadelphia, PA, USA
What is your role in your company/organization?
I am a trademark attorney responsible for our specialty haircare, health and wellbeing, and personal care brands, and I manage our brand protection department.
What makes your company unique?
Very few people recognize our company name, but everyone knows our brands. Our portfolio includes Arm & Hammer, Trojan, First Response, Nair, Spinbrush, OxiClean, Flawless, Waterpik and more. Our diverse product range, from pantry staples to consumer electronics, and even regulated medical devices, presents unique challenges from a brand protection and enforcement standpoint, because there is no “one size fits all” approach.
How do you show your company the value of brand protection?
1) set BP goals and targets that are tied to factors within your control (i.e. # of investigations) rather than promising specific financial results from enforcement efforts; 2) when the numbers support it, compare the size of the business BP interrupted to the size of one of your brands or one of your competitor’s brands – sometimes a developed counterfeiting ring IS your biggest competitor; 3) pictures from raids tell a story and everyone loves seeing this!
What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given?
“Everyone wants to eat, but few will hunt.” If you have an undeniable work ethic, success will follow. I got my first attorney job while bartending; one of my customers figured if I was willing to put that much effort into my summer weekend job serving drinks, I’d probably work my butt off as an attorney too. She was right.
As a CEO of Red Points, my role is to be an orchestra conductor: to make sure that everyone plays a beautiful melody in unison. If you have great musicians, but they decide to play the melody as they want, without aligning with the other musicians, it can turn into chaos quickly. I always look at the team’s harmony, their collaboration, and offer the training and tools the employees need to be successful, as well as set up a clear strategy and goals.
What makes your company unique?
What makes our company unique is our technology and our team.
We are the world’s first AI-based brand intelligence platform. By combining online brand protection, copyright enforcement, and distribution monitoring capabilities, Red Points provides full visibility into brands’ online presence.
On top of using world-class technology, I’m extremely proud of Red Points’ workforce. One of our strengths is our team and their expertise. Most of them come from the best companies around the world, and have joined us because Red Points’ offers a unique opportunity to disrupt the brand protection industry. Without them, Red Points would not be what it is now: the number one tech solution for more than 900 brands around the world.
What's the most rewarding part of your job / what is the thing that you've been most proud of in your anti-counterfeiting work?
The most rewarding part of my job is getting positive feedback from our clients. It is very satisfying seeing how much we help them in improving their business, in increasing their revenues, and in maintaining their reputation.
At Red Points, our mission is to make the Internet a safer place for brands and consumers. By taking down counterfeits, we are not only helping our brands and their customers, but also the environment. For that reason, and because June 5th is World Environment Day at Red Points we decided to raise awareness about the environmental impact of counterfeits while also contributing to a good cause.
How? We will be planting a tree with the organization One Tree Planted for each comment we receive in our social media channels where people can share interesting, scary, shocking or funny stories of when they accidentally bought a counterfeit.
What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given?
Someone told me once: do you know what leading means? To lead is when your team achieves something they thought they could not. When you motivate them, coach them and give them all the tools they need to do it, and they do it even though they thought it would be impossible.
I head up the Online Brand Enforcement team at Stobbs. I am responsible for a team that deals with everything from filing customs recordals and online takedowns through to administrative actions and litigation.
What makes your company unique?
We launched our Intangible Asset Management (IAM) offering 2 years ago as a departure from the traditional way of dealing with IP issues. IAM adopts a more holistic and strategic approach that recognizes a brand’s lifecycle and journey. We work collaboratively across our teams of lawyers, investigators, accountants, and licensing specialists. Having oversight and input on the brand creation, exploitation, and enforcement process provides the opportunity to work closely under one roof with non-lawyers. This makes it easy to advise on a brand issue beyond the straight IP angle and to learn different approaches and viewpoints in the process.
What is one way a brand with a mature IP enforcement program can take their efforts to the next level?
To treat data as a friend, not a foe. Anti-counterfeiting generates large volumes of data that can be easily overlooked because of the daily fight against bad actors. Taking time to work the data can help to unlock trends, patterns, and context. These insights can be fed back into the overall enforcement program. For example, upon closer inspection, a cluster of would-be lower level matters may warrant a bulk UDRP or a deep dive investigation based on online and offline intelligence. Next year’s budget and strategy can also be refined to account for a given approach or use cases.
What hobbies or causes are you passionate about?
Aside from the usual things like eating out and travelling, I’ve taken up restoring guitars in my spare time during this pandemic. Coming from a profession that deals in the intangible, it’s great to have something that requires physical craftsmanship and that offers a visible payoff at the end. I’m currently working on an old Stratocaster copy to give it a 21st Century makeover. It might be one that I end up keeping and playing (very badly).
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