LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As FOREO climbs the ranks of the top 10 beauty brands in the world, driving consumer demand and popularity, it has found an uptick in counterfeit activity. In 2018 alone, FOREO conducted 30 administrative raids, 15 criminal raids and seized approximately 30,000 fake LUNAs. This year, FOREO won the largest counterfeit-related payout for design infringement in Shanghai Intellectual Property Court history according to public data. In an unprecedented court ruling in Shanghai, FOREO was awarded a judgment of three million RMB (approximately $567,000 CAD).
The court ruling sided FOREO, following a 24-month IP court proceeding and a trial of 12 months, finding the defendant, Kingdom Zhuhai Company guilty of infringing FOREO’s LUNA design patent with its own KD308 product.
The defendant was thought to have made in excess of 35 million RMB (approximately seven million CAD) from online e-commerce sales mainly on Alibaba and Tianmao platforms. They were ordered to pay FOREO the aforementioned compensation and immediately stop infringing FOREO’s design patent. The court concluded that, while KD308 slightly differed from FOREO’s registered design via an extra bulge and wavy lines, it was still considered to infringe upon the LUNA design.
FOREO’s Global Legal Director, Kelsay Tang commented, “The court issued a warrant which enabled us to get relatively precise figures from Tianmao and Alibaba platforms. With tracking technologies, we found that 358,074 pieces of KD308 had been sold.”
“Taking the retail price, reasonable profit, and design patent contribution of our LUNA into consideration, the court concluded that our claim of three million RMB was reasonable. Given that IP protection is a relatively new concept in China, not to be confused with patent law which was created in 1984, we are seeing major progress on IP protection over the past years and this case follows the trend,” said Tang.
According to the 2018 Global Brand Counterfeiting Report, the worldwide losses incurred due to counterfeiting amounted to more than 320 billion in 2017, with 80% of the world’s counterfeiting coming from China.
Evan Feldstein is Vice General Manager and General Counsel for FOREO in North America, whose duties include guarding the brand's intellectual property in the US and Canada. Earlier this year, Law.com spoke with Feldstein, about the prevalence of counterfeits in North America. “To date, in the United States and Canada, we have filed approximately 85 design and/or utility patents. We have several programs and strategies in place to protect our brand. IP protection is about protecting our consumers as much as anything else, so high-quality FOREO products are in users' hands."
To protect its 20 million customers, every FOREO produced has a unique serial number that can be confirmed with the brand directly by registering on its warranty pages via FOREO.com. For further information on FOREO or to investigate whether you have been sold a fake FOREO LUNA device go to FOREO.com.
ABOUT FOREO
Swedish beauty-tech brand, FOREO, offers a new standard of beauty and wellness solutions, from the award-winning facial cleansing brushes in its LUNA line, inventing a whole new way to mask courtesy of UFO, to reinventing the toothbrush with ISSA. This approach is bold: the brand doesn’t just improve existing designs - FOREO Sweden tears them down and restarts from the ground up - ensuring the best solutions are not reserved for the wealthy few. FOREO promotes self-confidence: when you feel good, you look good - mission complete!
