While China is on its way to becoming the world’s largest luxury goods market, it is also where 80% of the counterfeit products seized by customs come from. In order to alleviate this problem, the country has just started training future specialists.
The luxury market is exploding in China’s major cities, where it represents 500 billion euros; in particular its capital Beijing. The demand for luxury goods has remained strong in China, particularly from the great French luxury houses, but the counterfeit market still holds a predominant place in this country. Counterfeit perfumes, clothing, alcohol, toys, shoes or sportswear abound, and professionals capable of recognizing imitations – even the best made – are therefore highly sought after by brands.
In particular, young business school students are training for the luxury industry, as they must be able to outwit counterfeiters.
“The verification of a watch mainly concerns the axis and the tip of the hand. The tip of a real watch is very sharp. On an imitation watch, the materials are obviously of lower quality,” explains a young student on how to guess a counterfeit watch.
“Brands use all sorts of different fonts on shoes, bags, wallets, leather goods or clothing,” says another student. says another student. “You have to know how to associate a font with an item and a brand“.
For this, theoretical and practical exercises are taught by Zhang Chen, founder of the Beijing Extraordinary Luxuries Technology School and “counterfeit hunter”.
“More than half of the goods we handle are fake, that’s the situation in the industry here. And out of this half of counterfeits, 60-70% are so bad quality that they can be recognized at first glance. Only 30% of the counterfeits are good imitations,” he says.
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