As If I Didn’t Have Enough On My Plate Already (Part 3)

These stories of theft and misappropriation never end for us at the Jaftex Corporation. I can probably write an entire blog series or a full book about all these situations. However, I am not going to do that. I will however continue to go after every person trying to take shortcuts by stealing our designs. As I become more successful at the “takedown”, I am definitely more motivated. Thank you in advance for sending any info on fakes, liars and thieves to me at scott@jaftex.com.

With that, I am going to wrap up the series of, “As If I Didn’t Have Enough On My Plate Already.” Today I am going to tell you the story behind my recent Facebook post where I showed this image:

For starters, let’s get past the fact that a fire in the forest might not be the best way to execute the destruction of the illegally printed fabric. However, this is how it was destroyed. What’s done is done. Most importantly, no one was hurt destroying this fabric or taking photos of it. Let’s also realize that this guy (meaning me) is not making fires like this or executing this sort of destruction. This is not my thing. I am a suburbs guy..lol. I prefer watching from afar and sharing photos. Oh yeah, I like roasting marshmallows too. Just saying.

As these stories usually go, I am sitting at my desk and I receive an email from a customer. This customer happened to be in Canada. The customer shared a picture of the design that a Jaftex competitor was offering in one of the competitor’s newest collections. She said, “Isn’t that a Kaffe design?” It sure was!

Let’s say the group being offered by my competitor was 15 pieces/skus. There was one design in the collection in 3 colorways that was an exact copy of a Kaffe Fassett Collective design. But for the contact from the Canadian customer, this may have made it to market and I may have never known. Fortunately, this was brought to my attention thanks to the eagle-eyed customer. Thank you to my friend in Canada! By the way, had it shipped to shops and then I found out, that would have strengthened my case and would have made it worse for my competitor and the supplier.

Continuing on with the story, I reached out to the competitor to address the situation. I happen to know them well. In speaking with the competitor, he explained how this all happened.

I don’t think I have ever reported on this way of acquiring designs or fabric collections, but it isn’t an uncommon practice for the mills in Korea to have an art team on staff or work with local freelance designers. The mills then offer these same freelance collections to companies like mine. The designer gets money for the art, the mill gets another line to print and they earn the money on the printing. We have done this before, but it isn’t something we do often. This is more for companies that lack an art staff and need to look at other ways of developing collections in a costly way. There is nothing wrong at all with acquiring lines this way.

Aside from knowing the competitor, we also happen to work with the Korean mill where these fabrics were produced. After a little bit of research, it became clear that neither the mill nor my competitor knew it was a copy until I informed them. At that point, they realized that the freelancer they were working with was the culprit.

As things played out, I didn’t feel it was right to penalize my competitor as they really didn’t do anything wrong. However, they were impacted because they had sold the design and they will lose those sales which is probably penalty enough. They also had to destroy the fabric. In addition, their group of 15 pieces/skus will be incomplete and they will only have 12 to deliver which may disappoint customers. So not the end of the world for the competitor, but not great either. This too shall pass for them, but a lesson was learned.

Since I didn’t have an easy way to go after the freelance designer through legal means, I decided to penalize the supplier by charging them a penalty for what they did and for working with the unethical freelancer. They actually took their medicine pretty well. For me, I always like to make sure there is some penalty for these wrongs otherwise people never learn and they will keep cheating you over and over again. I have left it to the mill to deal with the freelancer on their own. I am sure her reputation will be hurt for getting busted for copying as it should be. Hopefully, the mill will penalize her somehow for her unethical ways and they will not work with her ever again. That’s the story and I am sticking to it.