How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Copy

[Voiceover]: Foreign.

Nathan Bush: If 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 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 Krestevsky found this out four months after having her second baby. Mecca 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 past guests from ADD to CART who have had similar experiences and 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. Your socials are really good and you can tell that 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 verse all the boring parts of business.

Danny Holloway: Yeah, 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, I was devastated by this competitor because when I say they replicated absolutely everything from the website to the product to our copy to the ads, like, everything was like for like. And obviously we had the legal team and we went down that, 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. But 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.

Nathan Bush: I am interested in that call or that, that message with Adrian. What was his response when you're like, this is my idea. This is why I need your jet.

Danny Holloway: I think he understands the competitive landscape. 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, you can copy the website, you can copy the. You can try and copy the product, you can, you can do whatever you'd like, but you can't, you can't copy my brain and the creativeness, you know, that I bring to the brand. So I think for me, it was like, I just, I just felt better spending money on doing something like that rather than going down the whole legal process. Yeah.

Nathan Bush: So you didn't go legal?

Danny Holloway: No, 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, you know, it'd be pretty hard to. To keep up with. So we, we sent, you know, we sent the CC to cs, so we went down that path. But yeah, I don't even know where they are now, to be honest.

Nathan Bush: That's a good thing. You're like, who cares?

Danny Holloway: Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Bush: 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?

Danny Holloway: Look, it's always going to happen, especially when, 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 could almost guarantee it's going to be a terrible version just because of the amount of work that actually goes into its performance.

Nathan Bush: What 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 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, not 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 not an exact legal copy. But 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 to. Kelly Walker co founded the accessory brand Clipstar, and she gets copied constantly, close enough that her customers have actually returned someone else's knockoff to her by mistake.

Danny Holloway: We'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 customer, 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. We 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 sticking with us.

Nathan Bush: Clipster didn't out legal the knockoffs. They made the premium version the only one that their actual customer, ie, 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.

Danny Holloway: We get all the time we have people copying exactly our colorways, exactly our language on our website. We've had people 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. But yeah, I've just. The more and more it happens, the more I've just realized it's inevitable.

Nathan Bush: 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. Most of the time, 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. Davey Fogarty founded the Ooty and he draw 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.

[Voiceover]: The thing that annoys me is when there's literal counterfeit and there's counterfeit factories in China that we've tried to shut down with police and whatnot. But they, yeah, are literally selling out 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 trademarks, our trademarked characters and logos, our trademark logos, then as long as they're not doing that, I'm okay. I'm just head down and focusing on what I can do.

Nathan Bush: 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 moat 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 on over in the Add to Cart community. You can join for free at add to cart.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 start? 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 ShipIt'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.