Speaker 1If you are smart enough and brave enough to make your own product, you're always going to run the risk of being copied. The branding, the packaging, the ingredients, the exact shade of colorway, all of it can be reverse engineered by someone with strong factory connections and just a lack of IP regard. But what can't be copied is why your customers chose you in the first place. Today, we are going to look at some add to cart episodes, which give you tips on how to protect yourself against the copycats. Alicia Kristevski found this out four months after having her second baby. Make a baby. The milk warmer brand that she built from her own kitchen table got copied down to the website copy and the ad creative. She went through all the legal processes and to be honest, it was just exhausting for her. However, instead of putting more energy into fighting those faceless copycats, she put it into building something that copycats just can't replicate. We're going to hear her approach today, as well as other partners. guests from Add to Cart who have had similar experiences and share their lessons. A little note here, this isn't just a founder problem. Every brand that you're responsible for, whether you've built it or whether you're running someone else's, will get copied the moment that it starts working. This is all about finding the parts of your brand or your business that actually can't be replicated so that you spend your time on activities that are about growth rather than wasting time defending them against the parasites coming after you. Let's hear first from Alicia.
Speaker 2Your socials are really good and you can tell
Speaker 1that you enjoy doing the creative process. How do you wire your brain to kind of do the creative side of it and like you said, be really responsive when you see customer queries or opportunities come through to go and create content and turn into an ad, turn into sales? All the boring parts of business.
Speaker 3Yeah, look, I must admit like that is the shiny object thing for me and I'll tell you a wild story but when I was four months postpartum, now four months postpartum is a shocking stage and we had a competitor that killed me. Like I was devastated. I was devastated by this competitor because when I say they replicated absolutely everything from the website to the product to our coffee to the ads, like everything was like for like and obviously we had the legal team and we went down that process but it was exhausting and it really got me and so we, I went to high school with Adrian Portelli. He was in my year level so I messaged him and was like, I need your jet and in literally in a week's time because I knew we're about to launch a new product. In a week, I had this custom designed extravagant black dress made. I had a jet, I had a Lamborghini. I had this whole campaign that was like, it was ridiculous for a baby brand. We literally launched like a little mini film launching our black range for Black Friday and that's what I say with my creative brain that if something hits me, I will turn it around and I will go to the extremes to take it to that next level.
Speaker 2I am interested in that call or that message with Adrian. What was his response when you're like, this is my idea, this is why I need your jet?
Speaker 3I think he understands the competitive landscape and he understands the thing of like, no, I'm not going to let you win. I'm going to do something that you can't do and I think that was my whole theory. It was like, you can copy the website, you can try and copy the product, you can do whatever you'd like but you can't copy my brain and the creativeness that I bring to the brand. For me, it was like, I just felt better spending money on doing something like that rather than going down the whole legal process.
Speaker 2Yeah. So, you didn't go legal?
Speaker 3No. No, I dropped it. It was too exhausting and in the end, I don't even know if they're selling the product anymore because it'd be pretty hard to keep up with. So, we sent the cease and desist. So, we went down that path but yeah, I don't even know where they are now, to be honest.
Speaker 1That's a good thing. Who cares? Do you worry though about people like, say, for example, Kmart, we've seen them ripping off left, right and center recently. Do you worry? Because you're a premium price product. Do you worry about others trying to rip off and take some of that market?
Speaker 3Look, it's always going to happen, especially when there's been so much market validation. It clearly is a product that people need. So, I'm never going to be the only one in the world but I also know how difficult it is. To manage a product like this and to stay ahead of the game and to make sure that we are the best on the market. So, if Kmart were to bring one out, I can almost guarantee it's going to be a terrible version just because of the amount of work that actually goes into its performance.
Speaker 1What Alicia did with that campaign wasn't really about the jet, although that was very, very cool. It was a spending decision. Choosing to put the money and the energy, into being unmistakably her brand, Mecca Baby, rather than putting it into a legal fight that she was never going to enjoy winning anyway. Three other leaders in the Add to Cart archive have also doubled down on what makes them unique rather than go down the legal route. Although they all have very different reasons for doing so and they all had very different approaches. So, lesson one, you need to first decide what you're actually doing. Defending. Because the instinct when you get copied is just to defend the product. You can spend on patents, design registration, legal letters, and all of that really matters. That should all be in place. But someone with less overhead, no story, and let's be honest, very little moral compass can come in and easily get close to any one of your products, even if it's an exact legal copy. Instead of thinking about protecting at a product level, think about protecting the parts of your business that can't be reverse engineered, no matter how much someone spends trying. Kelly Walker co-founded the accessory brand Clipster, and she gets copied constantly, close enough that her customers have actually returned someone else's knockoff to her by mistake.
Speaker 4We're building our brand because that's something that they can't, replicate and building wholesale. So then they cannot go into the stores because they just don't have, you know, they're just not as premium. But, you know, we spend so much money on intellectual property, patenting, design registrations. We also spend time, you know, getting them down, but it's something that we kind of just have to live with every day. And the first time that it happened, oh my God, it just like absolutely broke my heart. But the bottom line is our company is a very, very good company. And it's a very, very good company. And it's a very, very If you're all just about getting the cheapest price, you're probably not our customer. And we're certainly not going to get into a race to the bottom.
Speaker 5We had this woman that was super angry about her hat clip, not holding her hat, but she didn't buy it from us. She didn't realize it was not from us. Our community, they know our product and they know it's good quality. And they know that we spend years developing it. And there's like a real thought behind it and we're testing it. So hopefully they continue. Hopefully they know that. And hopefully they continue.
Speaker 1Clipster didn't out legal the knockoffs. They made the premium version, the only one that their actual customer, i.e. their true target customer would really consider. The cheap copy products can have the cheap copy customer cohorts. It was never their ideal customer anyway. Don't spend time going after customers that are never yours. That brings us to lesson two. Compete on being wanted, not on being first. Once you're copied, the instinct is to prove that it was your original idea first. But no customer standing in front of two nearly identical products checks who launched when, who was first. What decides whether they buy or not when they have those two identical products is which one they actually want. Chasing first probably just burns energy defending a claim that customers actually don't care about. Danny Holloway, founder and CEO of the Gumboot brand, Merry People, started down the legal path when a competitor copied her colorways and her website language. But then she dropped it entirely.
Speaker 6We get all the time. We have people copying exactly our colorways, exactly our language on our website. We've had people copy our do that contact our retailers and tell them they will give us them a better margin than us and i used to get pretty hung up on it when you see people yeah directly copying things you kind of yeah it really hurts actually um but yeah i've just uh the more and more it happens the more i've just realized it's
Speaker 1inevitable if you're spending time proving that you were first that's time you are not spending on your brand your features your mission all the things that differentiate you and make a potential customer choose you you probably care about being first more than they do and lesson three build the parts of your brand that a copy can't fake sometimes i mean most of the time the best protection isn't legal at all it's making the specific unmistakable the best protection isn't legal at all it's making the specific unmistakable uncopyable parts of your brand so distinct that a copy is obviously fake the moment that someone looks twice davy fogarty founded the oody and he draws the exact same conclusion that alicia does he's relaxed about a competitor redesigning around the general concept and only goes after literal counterfeit because he never saw legal protections as his main protection it's all about being distinct
Speaker 7the thing that annoys me is when there's literal counterfeit there's counterfeit factories in china that we've tried to shut down with police and whatnot but they yeah are literally selling at the back door and they're really really bad quality which hurts our brand as well they're selling it in like markets so when they've copied our exact product but if they're copying you know our block and completely redesigning it and not infringing on our trademarked uh trademarked characters and and logos our trademark logos then as long as they're not doing that i'm i'm having this head down and focusing on what i can
Speaker 1do that's exactly what alicia's jet and lamborghini campaign was doing she had to stand out in a way that no other faceless copycat could it was about showing up being creative and connecting with her customers that will always stand out in a sea of sameness now the lawyers and the legal documents will and they should always have their place and you should set them up and rely on them when it is warranted however legal only protects the exact thing that gets copied and it can and it will continue to be a game of whack-a-mole hit one another will pop up you need to decide how and where you will spend your energy if you'd rather spend your time focusing on growing your brand rather than defending it you need to understand the types of customers that you will fight for the claims that you will compete on and the elements that will keep you instantly recognizable to your customers that seems a lot more fun than working with lawyers just in my opinion anyway if you want one test to run this week take whatever is easiest to point to in your business right now whether that's a hero product a signature offer a pricing structure and ask yourself whether a stranger with factory connections maybe a decent designer maybe a bit of claude could have it live in three months if the answer is yes you don't have your copycat mode yet and if you're working through what your own unmistakable thing actually is that's exactly the kind of conversation that is happening every day over in the add to cart community you can join for free at addtocart.com.au that's the playbook for this week go protect yourself from those copycats no one likes them anyway and we'll see you next friday how's this for a stat most retailers deliver three days faster than they advertise at checkout however 38 of shoppers are saying an accurate delivery estimate makes them more likely to buy so that promise gap could be costing you conversions but it is fixable and it is just one finding in ship it's state of shipping report from ai and amazon to fuel prices and delivery costs this report is your blueprint for retail growth in 2026 it is my go-to report every year for delivery and fulfillment you can download your copy with the link in our show notes
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