Counterfeit Fashion and Street Shopping

“You can always find something you want.”

• – Sophie Kinsella

When it comes to Fashion, there are times when young consumer’s turns to fake fashion to fill their wardrobe by shopping everything they want under the sky. Street markets are mixture of everything at a lower cost which is what a consumer requires. We constantly find an outstanding outfit to be comfortable and go with the trend for the best price and street markets are on it always having something coming up for us. There is high percentage of people buying counterfeit products knowingly, consumers under the age of 30 are well aware of counterfeit fashion industry and this interest of consumer is highly linked to its lower price. When the consumers want to wear a cloth for a general occasion or wants to wear it once or twice they would prefer buying apparel of lower cost for a wide variety. Local markets make sure the clothes have adequate price ratio to quality (not so bad) clothes. There is another reason a consumer shall prefer buying street outfit as it is available almost in every location/ city / town where as the people who doesn’t like wearing online products would definitely buy a street product knowing its counterfeit. Counterfeit fashion is basically the products of inferior quality sold under the brand name in an unauthorized way and these products are highly used by consumers which results in higher loss of luxury Fashion brands annually.

Counterfeit is a growing threat that affects the consumers and businesses in all parts of the world. This huge trend development has resulted in a sudden growth of this despicable marauding activity which is a form piracy in common trade parlance. Newer Trends development have also cause to become sophisticated to the counterfeit products resulting in convincing consumers that they can deceive others through the imitated product. In some cases brand counterfeiting is also carried out by producing the goods in the same factory as that of the authentic product and by using the same material. Counterfeiting a brand or product in Fashion Industry leads to infringement of intellectual property Rights especially Patent and Trademark. The growth of a business of a brand and its presence in online platform is also being caused by, as an owner of a brand which has been counterfeit has not effective control over this piracy activities unless it hires a third party to do so. Counterfeiting gravely affects the business of the brand owners resulting in loss of revenue from sales and profit margin.

Counterfeiting is a modern practice and is very difficult to neutralize it because of its cross border nature, Business and brand owners are required to control the situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened in order to protect their brand. Consequently, a comprehensive, sweeping, multifaceted methodology with a start to finish inventory network model ought to be embraced because in most cases the culprits who counterfeits are within the supply chain and have a substantial insider’s data about the business and the brand. Lastly, stricter laws should be sanctioned to battle this threat so that the brand owners whether established or a new brand owner do not stand at a financial risk because a lot of hard work, passion, investment and labour goes into setting up a brand name and customer base.

Author: Prekshaa Lunkad