Entrepreneurs battle copycats with new strategy

The corner of Broadway and Spring Street in New York City is a place bustling with street cart peddlers and shoppers looking for bargains. If you’d been standing on that corner on a warm summer’s day this past June, you likely would have been standing in front of a cart laden with inexpensive knockoffs of high-end women’s handbags.

And if you weren’t watching carefully, you might have been jostled by Eden Lipke, a 20-something New Yorker, who came dashing south on Broadway with a $10 bill in her hand to buy a designer original. She was rushing to that peddler’s cart to buy her dream purse, a small white clutch worth more than $300 at high-end stores like Saks or Bendell’s, if it had been available there — which it wasn’t.

“I've been searching for two weeks for one of these bags,” Lipke said as she slung it over her shoulder and reached for her cell phone. She was one of only eight people that day lucky enough to buy the genuine article.

Handbag designer Rachel Nasvik and her marketing team, Michael Hastings-Black and Biba Milioto, were selling just a few of these designer originals through a street peddler better known for cheap pirated fakes.

“It’s moving product in a space that’s not at all expected,” said Hastings-Black.

Nasvik, an up-and-coming New York handbag maker, already is selling her bags at high-end stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. As a fashion designer, she’s well aware that she’s working in an industry full of copycats and pirates who steal a designer’s styles and sell copies at a fraction of the price.

Piracy is pervasive
“Piracy is the biggest problem facing any piece of intellectual property in the world — and it’s getting worse as it’s becoming easier and easier to copy things,” said Matt Mason, author of “The Pirates Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”  

Mason argues that even with the law on your side, piracy today is so pervasive that it’s nearly impossible to combat. 

“I’ve always looked at piracy as an opportunity rather than a problem,” Mason said. “There’s also new money to be found in what pirates are doing, because often they’re highlighting a different revenue stream of a different market or a different distribution model.”

Back in New York, Nasvik, Hastings-Black and Milioto were using the pirate’s domain — the fly-by-night peddler carts — for their own purposes. They turned these carts into a treasure hunt location for their own special marketing project. Using the social networking site Twitter, they sent out clues to a pool of more than 1,000 followers, telling them where they could buy a small number of genuine handmade lambskin bags at locations usually known for selling cheapo, poorly made copies.

“How many people do you think are going to show up and how fast?” asked a reporter.

“There's the likelihood that within 10 to 15 minutes, they could even all be sold out,” Hastings-Black predicted.

He was right. In fact, it took even less time than that. The first lucky Twitter follower showed up in just under five minutes, and the last of the eight bags on the cart was sold in just over eight minutes.

While the campaign was not a money maker for Nasvik (she sold the bags at a loss for $10), she says that being considered cool enough to be copied by a pirate elevated the brand. 

“You're walking along and you're seeing, OK, here’s the Armani and there’s the Chanel and here’s the Rachel Nes — Who is Rachel Nasvik?” said Hastings-Black.

This campaign also turned the chore of buying a purse into a fun competitive game that energized her fan-base and caught the attention of the media as well.

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