With 2,200 employees, 23 brands and revenue of 3.3 billion Danish kroner, fashion retailer DK Company has its work cut out ensuring that no third party infringes its logos, product names or other trademark rights.
“Patrade helps us by keeping an IP safety net around all our daily routines. This means that we can rest assured that Patrade’s experts will automatically handle any important IP issues, follow up on them and keep us on our toes to ensure that we don’t miss anything,” says Anne Damsgaard, PA to the CEO of DK Company.
Easy to stay ahead of the game
Anne uses Patrade’s IT tool, IP Highlighter, on a daily basis, giving her an optimum overview of DK Company’s rights all over the world, whether in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Bangladesh or Canada. The clothes are mainly manufactured in China, India, Turkey and Bangladesh.
“IP Highlighter makes it easy for us to stay ahead of the game. It’s uncomplicated to retrieve all the trademark certificates we need, for instance to establish a partnership with a new customer in Russia or anywhere else. We can simply log on to the system and tick off the trademarks we want to renew. This has streamlined our daily work routines, and it means that we don’t need to spend as much time on the various workflows as we used to do,” she explains.
That’s why DK Company only needs to be in touch with Patrade’s experts in the event of issues that require the company to act, and that suits Anne very well.
“Because of our long-standing collaboration, we don’t need to be in close, daily contact. We’ll be notified when we need to take action, and it’s extremely valuable for us that we can safely leave the monitoring to Patrade,” she says.
Effective brand protection
Patrade monitors the internet for scam websites and any third parties filing applications for brand names that are too similar to those registered by DK Company, which include Matinique, Cream, ICHI, b.young, Fransa, Blend, Gestuz, InWear and Solid.
“It would be damaging to our brand if customers receive an inferior product or receive no product at all from a scam website. Patrade does a brilliant job weeding out scams and counterfeits, its monitoring, advisory and brand protection services make Patrade an excellent right-hand man indeed,” says Anne and she adds:
“We can ask them anything, and we always get an answer. In a large organisation such as ours, it’s essential that we get a written answer, because it allows me to engage my own organisation to ensure that we all learn as much as possible about our trademarks and how to handle them,” she says.
Strengthened in-house awareness
In-house awareness is especially important in situations where the tables are turned and DK Company needs to come up with new names without getting too close to the rights of other companies.
Patrade has therefore made a product name no-go list for DK Company, which is updated once every three months. In addition to updating the list so as to prevent employees from choosing product names that would infringe third-party rights, Patrade regularly makes presentations for procurement staff and designers on the dos and don’ts in their specific field of work.
“We try to influence the entire organisation to avoid that every single employee needs to have specialist in-depth knowledge, and I think it’s working really well,” Anne concludes.