Who doesn't want to carry a bag of Gucci, Prada, Dior or Ferragamo? Moreover, who has not been tempted by those near-identical falsifications to the original Goyard, Hermès or Chanel?
The market for the falsification of luxury products-especially hooliganism-is as large as bazaars and Chinatown is around the world. There was even the urban legend that some of the superluxury brands they made in the Asian giant allowed the forgery of some models that "wanted to be fashionable" to encourage sales. The truth was never known, but the truth is that it is spectacular to see how in the huge windows on Manhattan Fifth Avenue today the new-season items that yesterday-literal-you could buy in Chinatown from the big apple look today.
But that's not the issue in the counterfeit business. The point is, you actually pay the price of what you buy because you Don't really want to pay what it actually costs. In addition, the proliferation of e-commerce has had a direct impact on counterfeit sales for a few years. And the obvious is the obvious, no one gives pesetas hard.
The luxury imitation bag business moves around $350 billion in the world. About 67 per cent of counterfeit products come from China.
A few days ago Gucci and Facebook joined forces in a California court to sue an individual who allegedly used the social media platforms of the American group to sell fake Gucci products. This is not the first time that this firm has decided to make pineapple with others to denounce counterfeit sellers and even the platforms that shelter them-as in the case of Alibaba. But this is the first time that a platform, Facebook, and a brand, Gucci, go hand in hand with the user who supposedly talks about the crime.
It is true that Amazon filed several lawsuits in 2020 with Valentino and Ferragamo, but this is considered a sales platform, not a channel in which information, opinions, etc., are poured, such as Facebook.
Online sales of luxury bags, shoes and clothing have skyrocketed over the past year when the coronavirus pandemic forced retail stores to temporarily close their stores. Facebook is trying to position itself-especially through Instagram-as a channel for the sale of third party products, and the fact that forgeries proliferate has a reputational and business cost that cannot be assumed.
"more than a million pieces of content were removed from Facebook and Instagram in the first half of 2020," according to the joint statement of the two companies. In 2020 alone, Gucci's intellectual property equipment achieved the elimination of four million listings of counterfeit products online, the seizure of 4.1 million counterfeit products and the deactivation of 45,000 websites, including social media accounts.
