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.
In a world replete with copycats and incremental iteration, we are fortunate enough to say we created an entire category, own the IP surrounding it, and remain the leading player in that space. Granted, 3D pens aren’t in every household (yet), but it’s incredibly rewarding to have created something so new and then, despite being a small company, have found ways to protect it and grow it. One of our core values as a company is “doing more with less”, and that certainly speaks to the strategic approach we’ve adopted to protect our IP and grow our market.
What’s one piece of advice you can give a brand looking to enforce their IP?
Be strategic. Depending on which day of the week it is, I could curse or praise our IP attorneys, BUT I will never forget the deeply strategic approach they advised us to take when we started our company. If you protect “everything everywhere” you’ll run out of cash. You have to always be asking yourself, where do I need protection, and what kind of protection do I need. That last part is all important, as you have to be a realist about what will actually get the job done for you and how you’ll go about enforcing it.
What hobbies or causes are you passionate about?
As a kid I used to collect swatch watches, and still own over 200 of them. I’d queue outside the Swatch shop on Oxford street in the cold London Winter at 6am to get in line for one of the limited-edition specials. Aside from wondering why on earth my parents let me do this, my collection is a reminder of the enduring power of brand and design. At the end of the day Swatches are run of the mill plastic-strapped watches. But regardless of that, whenever I see new designs come into my inbox, my imagination is kindled by the fun and inventiveness they imbue in their products day in day out. We protect our IP rigorously, but IP protection alone is never enough – you also have to make a great product that delights people, otherwise what’s the point?
I am the President & CEO of Covectra--a leader in track & trace solutions for brand protection. Covectra’s initial product was in serialization technology, trade-named AuthentiTrack, was originally designed for the pharmaceutical industry but has been engineered to accommodate a wide range of products across multiple industries. Covectra recently introduced a new smart label technology, StellaGuard, which integrates a 2D barcode printed on a label material that has a unique number of 3D holographic “stars”. Virtually impossible to simulate by a counterfeiter, this product is used by consumers to authenticate a product using a Smart phone. StellaGuard is being made available to a wide number of industries.
What makes your company unique?
Covectra’s team of engineers have refined the capability to develop products and processes that have an extremely high value to cost ratio. Where possible, we utilize commercially available components rather than proprietary ones, and develop software that is unique and relatively easy to implement and operate. This straightforward approach decreases the cost to purchase and operate. With our StellaGuard technology, we have advanced a process for applying the unique brand protection capability with partners in the label conversion industry. Working with a label converter, we are able to provide the brand owner with a relatively straightforward way to apply extreme counterfeit production for each product that is labeled with StellaGuard Most importantly, consumers are able use StellaGuard to determine the authenticity of the product with their smartphone.
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?
There are several rewarding aspects of my job at Covectra. The first is to see the personal growth of each employee at Covectra. The second is in recognizing the value and benefit that we are providing to our customers, some of whom we have had continuously for thirteen years. The greatest pride that we have is to observe the degree of satisfaction that our customers have after they have formed a relationship with us, and trusted that our capabilities will in fact provide solutions to their anti-counterfeit challenges.
How did you get into brand protection?
Our Chairman, a distinguished Harvard-educated psychiatrist, Dr. David Bear, had started the company by himself to identify areas of opportunity within the pharmaceutical industry. He met senior executives of the company that became our first customer, listened to the type of support that they needed to serialize and provide other brand protection. After several meetings, the pharmaceutical company asked us to help them serialize their products at all levels, including the unit dose. This customer also asked us help them implement a patient assistance program that utilized serialization at the unit dose level. This was ten years before serialization was required for all prescription products.
120 years of experience means tradition, but we also value innovative and modern thinking and actions.
Multiple expertise and a large team of top-level litigators, trademark and patent attorneys allow us to deliver work in a wide spectrum, even if they involve high complexity, large volume of cases and various jurisdictions concomitantly.
Our own investigation group is the key to gather solid pieces of evidences, find individuals and companies with direct or indirect connection to the infringement and grounding future cases.
Finally, an extensive associate’s network expands our capacity to coordinate and manage cases throughout the country or worldwide.
Can you provide your top 2 best practices for protecting IP?
IP protection become effective with two basic pillars: investigations and seizures.
Companies are no longer willing to invest money in activities other than their core businesses and this also happens with investigations to find potential targets.
However, since investigations are fundamental for identifying illegalities and winning cases, companies must keep external teams of investigators to, monitor suspects and measure the levels of fakes, either in the physical market or online.
Effective enforcement is also a condition for cleaning the market, protecting businesses partnerships and consumers.
Therefore, if you have a firm handling interactively both investigation and enforcement services, much better.
What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given?
Before practicing law, I dedicated 3 years of my life to medicine school, with full scholarship. When I shifted to law school, my father advised me not to stop working hard, regardless my academic choice.
Thus, in the first year of college I started an internship at Baker & McKenzie, where I had my first contact with intellectual property. While there, I questioned which would be the best law firm to work with IP in Brazil; Dannemann Siemsen was the answer and after 27 years, I am still there.
My father's advice remains alive in me today, no matter where I am.
What are the top 2 challenges in IP enforcement you see affecting your industry over the next year?
A major challenge affecting IP enforcement for all industries is the rapid growth of E-commerce platforms, further catalyzed by third-party online marketplaces, which have led to increases in illicit trade in counterfeit products and IP theft in goods and services.
Another key task in the near-term is dealing with the fallout of the pandemic which has significantly affected trends in the trade of counterfeit and pirated goods. Supply chains of finished goods and raw materials have been disrupted, as well as the channels these goods are sold through, and managing this complexity presents both a major challenge and an opportunity.
What are your top 2 recommendations to a brand that is building up its IP enforcement program?
An effective IP enforcement program provides supply chain actors with a means to conduct fast, reliable and secure authentication of genuine products to:
safeguard critical revenue
prevent brand identity erosion
protect public health and safety
maintain consumer confidence
It is also vitally important to design a multi-layered protection system, incorporating both visible and invisible security features for different stakeholders. Certain invisible authentication solutions provide immediate and indisputable authentication and therefore court admissible evidence, allowing the IP team to establish facts that will enable quick and decisive legal actions in full confidence of IP infringement.
How did you get into brand protection?
I transitioned from SICPA’s Identity and Value Document business for Latin America into our Brand Protection division for North America. In my previous role, my focus was on offering technologies that helped to protect the integrity of identity documents and credentials. Similar to branded products, ID documents are only as good as the trust we place in them – SICPA is part of enabling that trust system.
There is really no difference in how we are securing and protecting product integrity. The stakes are even higher as my challenge is now helping the industry create products that consumers can trust and use safely.
Partner and Co-Chair of our Brand Integrity and Innovation Group.
What makes your company unique?
We formulate brand protection strategies targeted to our clients’ particular situations and that are scalable in response to their changing needs. We understand the importance of return on investment and building a program that demonstrates the value of the program to the business.
Our team includes highly experienced lawyers and former federal and state prosecutors, and global security and brand protection experts with extensive backgrounds leading anti-counterfeiting, anti-piracy and customs interdiction and investigation programs in both private companies and law enforcement agencies. Our team assists companies in implementing brand protection strategies to halt the importation of counterfeit goods and prevent the sale of counterfeit products. As part of this effort, we help companies target and investigate counterfeit traffickers, and then assemble and analyze evidence to support successful criminal investigations and prosecutions as well as civil litigation resulting in asset freezes and other remedies.
For more than 20 years, our team has actively worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection and other state and federal law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. in its representation of victim companies, resulting in dozens of criminal convictions, jail sentences and restitution orders. Relying on our team’s international law enforcement experience, we also actively coordinate investigations and law enforcement referrals in jurisdictions all over the world.
We are also unique in the way we have integrated technology into the services we provide including working with other service providers and developing data focused software solutions to address our clients brand protection objectives
How do you show your clients the value of brand protection?
For many, if not all clients, the value of brand protection comes down to Return on Investment (ROI). Showing the value of brand protection is a challenging journey which begins with understanding the client’s pain points and how exactly those pain points impact or diminish their brand. Key issues typically, but not always, include reduced market share, margin loss and the loss of brand confidence at the consumer level.
Obtaining buy-in from key internal and external stakeholders is also crucial to establishing brand protection value in every corporate environment. In that regard, it is vital for brands to ensure a common vocabulary is used throughout the brand protection ecosphere and that clear definitions are agreed on, including how “success,” is defined so that results are measurable for the brand protection team. Once the ROI equation is agreed upon, deploying resources and prioritizing targets can be more focused and quantifying results more meaningful. Of course, one of the key determinates of showing value or “proof” requires data. We are increasingly working with our clients, both new and existing, to drill down on and utilize their existing data to bring value to the corporation and allocate resources to address their most vexing problems. In fact, the proliferation of data and the need to learn how to better utilize it caused our firm to invest in and co-found True Pedigree (www.truepedigree.com), which provides SAAS based data-centric solutions that provide track and trace for anti-counterfeit enforcement, gray market abatement and partner audits. Our clients have seen that data analytics is a true game changer for brand protection. As our client’s ROI needs evolve we have done the same.
Can you tell us something about yourself outside of your job?
I love to cook (and eat, of course). Spending more time at home due to the pandemic has provided an opportunity to experiment with different foods and recipes. Living in the temperate climate of the SF Bay Area affords me the opportunity to grow and use fresh herbs and vegetables that can positively transform almost any recipe. I also love experimenting with pairing food with wine. I have been fortunate to do a bit of international travel and to try some local wine along the way. Drinking wine from France, Spain, South Africa or Argentina while at home has allowed my family and I to travel virtually for the past year, which has provided some fun in an otherwise challenging year.
I am also an avid reader and have recently read “An Elegant Defense: the Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System” by Pulitzer Prize winning author Matt Richtel. Written for the non-scientific types, like me, it provides a fascinating look at the science behind our immune system, a subject that is incredibly apropos right now.
