It started out as the American Dream. FinalStraw, which makes an environmentally friendly straw, raised nearly $2 million in crowdfunding and was even on 'Shark Tank.' But the dream turned into a nightmare unfolding across the globe in China.
The business started out beyond Emma Cohen's wildest dreams, but soon she discovered a threat to the brand she was building.
FinalStraw's problem isn't unique. Copycatters are monitoring crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and watching for trendy products to go viral, according to Amedeo Ferraro, an intellectual property attorney. FinalStraw was hoping for just $12,500 but quickly surpassed that goal. The company ultimately raised nearly $1.9 million on Kickstarter, but within weeks Cohen said she began seeing copies coming from China.
"A patent is only as good as its enforcement," Cohen said. "It's essentially a nice, shiny, expensive piece of paper that we then need to go out and enforce."and other major retail websites, CNBC found many listings for what appear to be knockoff FinalStraws. One was even using images from the brand's Kickstarter campaign.
"We get angry emails all the time from customers who are confused as to why the quality of the product that they ordered is terrible," Cohen said. "The scariest thing is that there is no regulation on the materials that they're using. There's no quality control." "It's also very burdensome on our resources, because this is time that my staff could be spending doing way more productive things, versus just fighting off these knockoffs," Cohen said.Some of the impostors set up fake websites that look like the real one. Cohen showed CNBC one website that showed the same bio and images of the company's team that the real website does. The copycats even copied the picture of Cohen's dog."Most of them were offshore.
Emily said she was approached by a company to post the straw on her account. She said originally she did not respond, but when they contacted her again a few months later and had customer reviews, she agreed to post the ad and received a payment for an undisclosed amount. "I can't know who the real legitimate of a product is [sic]," Eugene, who runs the account, said in an email. Funny.window has 1.2 million followers.
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