Ashley Alderson warns small business owners that selling knockoff or unlicensed goods can get your Shopify store, ad accounts, and social media shut down. Check trademarks on the USPTO website, get licensing proof for branded merchandise, and skip dupes entirely. The legal and financial risk isn't worth it.
Foreign. Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey, are you ready to lose it all? Well, I'm going to tell you what you could do to speed it up and help you get there. This might be a little bit dramatic. Okay, I got it. But I actually am speaking the truth. If you're ready to lose it all, just work on carrying trademark and copyright and licensing infringing goods. That's a great way to get started. I hate that I even have to share this five minute Friday. But the truth is I continue to see this happening across our industry. Whether you consciously know about this or subconsciously just have something and you thought it was okay all along, I see both sides every single day. I just want to help stop you for a sec and have you evaluate the inventory that you're carrying in your business and make sure that it is legal for you to be selling whatever it is that you're selling. So let's really quickly get into these kind of three areas of importance. And before we do, let me start with kind of an overarching. You know, here's my obvious message. If somebody took a picture of your face, right, your beautiful face, and put it on a T shirt, and maybe it had a clever saying on it or whatever, it was just your face with something on a T shirt. And this person started to sell these T shirts and the T shirts went completely viral. They sold millions of dollars in T shirts with your face on them. And this business kept all the profits. Even though it was your face on the T shirt, you didn't get a dime. How would that make you feel? You'd probably be kind of upset, right? Like if you had a product that went viral with your face on it, you would want a cut of the change, you'd want a piece of the action. But every single day in business, I see businesses living this exact reality where a business owner is selling a knockoff Louis Vuitton knockoff Chanel. Maybe it's a T shirt with Dolly Parton's face on it. Maybe it's the lyrics to Morgan Wallen's newest song. Maybe it's a Disney character. Maybe it's a Dallas Cowboys T shirt, or, my gosh, it is the Chiefs, you guys, every day I see businesses carrying these things, and some are legal and some are not. So here's what you need to know about not losing it all in your business by carrying these items. Number one, are the things that you're carrying actually trademarked. So is the product you're carrying a likeness of somebody else's registered trademark? So there is a great website, USPTO.gov, which is our US patent and trademark Office, and you can do a search on any trademarks that are registered. So an example, your business's logo, my business's logo, they're probably both going to be trademarked, or they should be. If you haven't done that yet, maybe it's your business's tagline. So for us, hashtag Boutique Boss is trademarked, right? You can't sell T shirts with hashtag Boutique Boss on them, because we own that trademark and we want to be able to sell T shirts with Boutique Boss on them. So make sure whatever it is that you are selling, you know that it's not trademarked and registered to somebody else. And then therefore, you're selling the product and making a profit off of it. The opportunity that you have to sell trademarked goods is through a licensing agreement. So if you're going to sell something like a Dallas Cowboys T shirt or a Chiefs T shirt and it has the actual logo or a trademarked mark of that company on it, you have to make sure that these are officially licensed goods. So typically, what the NFL does or what college teams do or what Disney will do is there will be a licensing number. And a lot of times, like a little tiny sticker with a hologram on it that will tell you that this is actually a licensed good. If you're going to market or if you're buying online from a wholesale vendor and they have these items, right, they have band T shirts or again, something with Disney on it or Dallas Cowboys on it. Make sure you ask for proof of their licensing agreement, because there's a lot of people that will say, oh, yeah, it's licensed. You know, you're good, you're safe. You can sell this when in fact, it's not. So make sure you ask for proof of that before you sell it. And then the third thing that you should just really be aware of specifically is, is looking for knockoff or dupe goods. If you see anybody who's selling something that says, oh, these are dupe Hunter boots, these are dupe Chanel Bags. This is dupe makeup, which kind of just sounds gross. Anyway, if you ask me anything that's a dupe is a huge red flag. So beware of those three levels of understanding when it comes to the products that you're selling, because here's the risk. This is you losing your business. There are people that are specifically looking for this and there are bots that are specifically looking for this across social media. So it's a fast way to get your Facebook page, your group, your ad account, all of your social media immediately taken down. It's also a great way to lose your entire Shopify site. And I have seen both of those things happen multiple, multiple times. So this is really important. It's the reason I wanted to dedicate an entire five minute Friday to it is because you, you can fall into this trap so fast. So the more you know, the more you know you do not want to lose your business and everything you've worked so hard for. So be very careful when it comes to selling any good that has any kind of likeness of anyone. Even if the person selling it to you says it's safe or says, I changed it 20%, it's legal, it's actually not. It's not worth the risk. Make sure you protect your business, your assets and your investment. And beware of the amazing products that you can sell that that are not a part of this dupe and knockoff and trademark culture. Thanks for listening, guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.
