Hypebeast culture in Los Angeles may be most conspicuous in the sneaker-heads queuing out the door of Coolkicks on Melrose. The near-constant throng of collectors turns up not only to buy, but also to sell. “We could have anywhere from 200 to 600 people bringing shoes to us every day at Melrose,” says Adeel Shams, co-founder of Coolkicks, which also has locations at the Grove and in Las Vegas and runs live online shopping events that regularly draw six-figure audiences.
Every pair of sneakers offered to Coolkicks is authenticated before a buy offer is made — a necessary step, given that footwear is among the most counterfeited product categories globally, alongside high-end handbags, watches, fragrances and other designer-driven items in labels ranging from Nike and Off-White to Chanel, Hermès (maker of the oft-forged Birkin bag), Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Patek Philippe and many others. Authentication is a vital step not only for brands these days, but for retailers, resellers and consumers as well: London-based trademark protection firm Corsearch predicts the economic impact of counterfeit goods could reach $1.79 trillion by 2030.
To handle the volume of potential fakes and weed them out, brands, buyers and sellers are increasingly turning to services that authenticate consumer products using artificial intelligence. Shams works with Entrupy, a New York-based company whose authentication methods include a customized light-box setup that helps take photographs of a product from a variety of angles, which are then analyzed by AI to assess key details. The quality of the leather, the pattern of the stitching or the fabric on an insole, for example, are all viewed microscopically in a process that can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per shoe. (The process is still quicker than that of a human authenticator, who could only handle one item at a time.) If the Entrupy system cannot confirm that the sneakers are genuine, it’s not so bold as to declare the items fake; it simply labels them “unidentified.” Roughly 6 percent of the shoes analyzed at Coolkicks have been rejected as such.
Entrupy CEO and co-founder Vidyuth Srinivasan says he and his partners were exploring the use of AI for luxury goods authentication as far back as 2014. “We thought, ‘What if we built a system in which we took images of both real and fake products, taught the system how to detect the differences between the two, and then deployed that online?’ Those images would be shipped out to the cloud, and there we had an algorithm making the decision,” he explains. “Today we’re recognized as a standard of trust in the industry with brands, social media platforms, resellers, pawn shops and even certain government organizations.”
Srinivasan also employs in-house experts to back up the system with a human element. For the rare times Entrupy does get it wrong — “a false positive,” he calls it — he says his company puts its money where its mouth is, purchasing the item that was falsely identified. That act “also takes the counterfeit out of circulation, which is our aim,” he adds. Shams says he’s never had to take advantage of that policy. “They’ve never gotten it wrong for us,” he notes.
With 600 employees and offices on four continents, Texas-based Authentix likewise works with a variety of brands and marketplaces that sell luxury items across multiple product categories. Among its services, Authentix employs its algorithms to continuously search for counterfeit listings. “Typically our client is the brand owner, and with our AI-enabled brand-protection tools, we’re constantly scanning millions of websites and looking at roughly 500,000 products a month,” says Tim Driscoll, chief technology officer for Authentix, which also works with such marketplaces as Meta, TikTok and Amazon to identify counterfeit merchandise. Across the 300 brands and logos Authentix supports, the company boasts a 90 percent compliance rate in both confirming counterfeit listings and having them removed.
Alt Vault is another solution that started with luxury watches but has since expanded to include handbags, sneakers, fragrances and other products. The web-based program is designed to be user-friendly for sellers, resellers and consumers alike. “A consumer can use it to make sure that what they’re buying is authentic, while resellers can use it, then upload products that include an authentication report we generate for them,” notes a company spokesperson, who asked not to be identified by name. “Counterfeits are a huge problem in the secondary market, but we can ID products at a deep, microscopic level, and that’s been effective for everyone: brand, retailer, reseller and the end consumer.”
Among Srinivasan’s favorite success stories: A series of six Chicago pawn shops, all of which are clients, received inquiries about the same luxury handbag over the course of one afternoon. “We were able to watch this person trying different places to sell what they had, and each one turned them down after using our service, and the seller ultimately gave up,” he remembers.
That confirms what Srinivasan and others believe about the future of battling counterfeits. “You can never completely eradicate counterfeiting,” he says. “What you can do at best is become a deterrent.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
English (US) ·