Selling cheap fakes of a successful product makes horribly good business sense. Is there any way to stop it?was standing in front of an imposing townhouse in the swish 16th arrondissement of Paris. Its classical lines, marble staircases and delicately wrought iron balustrades belied the fierce sense of purpose inside. The Musée de la Contrefaçon is an unusual kind of museum – it specialises in counterfeits.
that hung off the zip was a plain gold ring, where it should have been a leaping Longchamp horse and jockey. The inside of mine lacked the deliciously thick, rubbery, almost sticky quality of the genuine article. Compared to the real thing, the leather on my bag was oddly spongy and insubstantial, the stitching inadequate.
We came to a halt outside a two-storey, sharply gabled house. In the front parlour, which serves as a meeting room, I was plied with extremely good coffee by Grootswagers and his colleague Mary-Ann Kouters.
When I put this question to Grootswagers and Kouters, an intense look came over Kouters’ face. “Even if you made it exactly the same – which counterfeiters never do – you’d still be stealing from the brand manufacturer because the manufacturer has invested money in advertising, sponsorship deals, building the brand,” she said.
It suits companies that produce branded products to separate the tangible from the intangible, to locate manufacturing wherever is cheapest and to spend more on beaming out the brand message. But what is becoming increasingly obvious is that the brands’ business strategy suits the counterfeiters even better.