No brand is too small for counterfeiters
Team Dream is a small business by most any measure.
The quirky cycling apparel brand has just five employees. It produces only about 100 pieces of each garment and operates out of a converted gas station in San Marino, where a closet-sized nook doubles as both a fulfillment center and R&D lab.
Its founder, Sean Talkington, has taken in no outside investment and only applied for his first credit card a few years ago because his bank told him he needed one to operate a retail store.
“We’re a blip,” Talkington said.
So it came as a shock one day to learn that Team Dream clothing was being counterfeited and sold on a major Chinese e-commerce site.
Piracy was a problem that befell big brands such as Nike and Adidas, Talkington thought, not upstarts like Team Dream, which has no advertising budget and got its start selling clothes out of a 1970 Volkswagen bus.
But there it was, a cheaper facsimile of Team Dream’s U.S.-made $135 “Thin Stripe Long Sleeve” jersey for sale on Taobao, China’s premier online shopping site owned by Alibaba, for about half the price.
The seller, a store named Gentleman Racing Club, made only the slightest changes: removing Team Dream’s chubby bobcat logo and stamping GRC on the back. Its page, which Alibaba removed after talking to The Times, even included one of Team Dream’s Instagram photos of a cyclist wearing the jersey on Highway 2 in Angeles National Forest (Gentleman Racing Club did not respond to a request for an interview).
Talkington was initially irked. Sourcing Italian microfleece and finding a reliable Southern California manufacturer are no easy tasks. Irritation then gave way to befuddlement. How much money could anyone make selling phony Team Dream kit? In the end, Talkington felt almost flattered.
“If you’re getting knocked off, maybe you’ve made it,” said Talkington, who never reported the offending seller to Alibaba. “Maybe if you’re not getting knocked off, you’re not cool enough.”
Just a decade ago, relative anonymity would have shielded a company as small as Team Dream from counterfeiting. But in the era of Instagram and global e-commerce, obscurity is no longer an option — and anyone is fair game.
Team Dream isn’t as big as Rapha — pioneers of the hipster cycling aesthetic, who sold their apparel company recently to the Walmart heirs — but it still boasts over 30,000 Instagram followers. That’s enough to buoy a loyal customer base and, apparently, attract counterfeiters on the other side of the world.
“Anything to make a buck,” Bruce Foucart, former director of the U.S. government’s National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, said of counterfeiters. “If there’s a niche, they will know about it.”