In my previous blog, Creator-Led Dupe Culture in Beauty: What OLAPLEX has Taught us About Brand Trust, I shared a case study example that illustrates how brands can respond to the dupe movement in an innovative and engaging way.
It also highlighted a very important point, that not every brand threat begins with a fake product.
Each new beauty product launch could be your biggest growth opportunity — or your biggest IP infringement headache. Every time a product goes viral, demand and market share grows.
This is also the prime opportunity for counterfeiters, copycats and unauthorised sellers to cash in on your success — stealing sales, taking revenue, damaging consumer trust and undermining the investment made in creating your beauty innovation.
So, the question isn’t whether your brand will be targeted. It’s whether you’ll spot the threats early enough to stop them having an impact.
AI is changing how consumers discover and engage with beauty products. Creators and influencers can turn a new launch into a global trend overnight. Social commerce is shortening the journey from inspiration to purchase to minutes.
It’s exciting times. But there is a scary side to this speed.
As fast as a beauty brand creates demand, the faster that demand can attract copycats, counterfeiters, unauthorised sellers and impersonators.
For brands investing heavily in innovation, marketing and consumer engagement, protecting that investment needs to become part of the growth strategy — not an activity that happens after IP infringement is detected.
Today, a fake product can appear alongside the real thing in a comparison video or influencer post. An unauthorised seller can hijack demand you’ve spent millions creating. A copied image can send consumers somewhere you don’t control. And a counterfeit product can damage the brand trust you’ve worked years to build.
The opportunity is enormous. But so are the risks. So how do you grow at speed without losing control of your brand?
Here are my 5 steps to protecting your beauty brand online.
1. Treat brand protection as part of your growth strategy
Brand protection can sometimes sit in a silo, owned by legal or ecommerce teams and measured by the volume or value of infringements removed.
This approach for the beauty industry is completely outdated. It’s no longer about volumes.
It’s about integrating brand protection into the NPD lifecycle, across multiple business functions.
Before launch
Identify all the product assets that can be protected to prevent IP infringement. Logos, packaging, product imagery, campaign assets, distinct/unique product designs and trade dress, authorised distribution channels and sellers, and marketing channel mix.
At launch
Share campaign plans, legitimate sellers and listings, hero product imagery and marketing assets with the biggest push. These all help suspicious activity to be identified quickly.
After launch
Watch closely for purchase behaviour changes. Are there deviations from the shopping journey that were not planned that could indicate copies are appearing on fake websites? Where is the customer drop off point — are they being redirected to unofficial channels?
Sharing these signals embeds brand protection into the NPD process rather than treating it as an afterthought. They can also shape future NPD plans, helping protect growth over time.
2. Protect the innovation behind your NPD before launching
Beauty innovation is one of the industry’s biggest growth engines.
New formulations, new ingredients, innovative packaging, connected devices, product formats and positioning all require significant investment.
But once a product launches, most of that innovation becomes completely visible to the market.
That creates an uncomfortable reality:
The product that took months or sometimes years to develop can potentially be copied in days!
3. Ensure social commerce is part of your protection strategy
The beauty industry is at the forefront of the changing ways consumers discover and purchase products through the growing importance of creators, social commerce and influencers.
This creates a big challenge for traditional brand protection models that cannot operate with agility.
A consumer may see a product on TikTok, encounter a creator discussing it, search for the brand on Google and ultimately purchase through a marketplace in minutes.
Meanwhile, counterfeiters or unauthorised sellers can use the exact same shopping ecosystem to intercept that customer at any stage. They can also pivot strategies if they see an improved ROI in a different approach.
For beauty brands, monitoring therefore needs to extend beyond traditional ecommerce marketplaces, and the protection programme needs to remain agile.
Cover should be broad across marketplaces, social platforms, social commerce, search, paid advertising, app stores, domains, fake websites, brand impersonation — such as copied imagery, unauthorised sellers and more.
The principle is simple: Protect the places where your customers are today, and tomorrow — not just the places where counterfeit products have historically appeared.
4. Don’t confuse visibility with brand protection
AI is increasingly being used across the beauty industry — from content creation and consumer diagnostics to product development and marketing.
The same technological shift has changed brand protection. AI and image-recognition technology can help brands identify suspicious listings at scale, including infringements that may not contain an obvious brand name.
But technology should not become the objective.
A dashboard containing thousands of potential infringements is not necessarily useful information.
The real question is: Can your brand protection system help you understand what matters to your growth strategy?
Specifically:
- Which infringements pose the greatest commercial risk?
- Which sellers are responsible for the most activity?
- Which products are being targeted the most, and where?
- Which platforms are becoming problem areas?
- Are the same infringers appearing across multiple channels?
- Which threats require immediate action?
The value comes from turning these data points into insightful reports that inform relevant business decisions.
5. Protect consumer trust, not just IP
This is particularly important in beauty.
Consumers are putting products on their skin and bodies, and in their hair. They expect products to be authentic, safe and consistent with the claims made by the brand.
A counterfeit product can therefore create consequences beyond lost revenue for beauty brands.
It can potentially affect:
- Consumer safety
- Product efficacy
- Customer experience
- Reviews and ratings
- Brand reputation
- Social sentiment
- Retailer relationships
- Consumer trust
In essence, this means the response to a high-risk counterfeit or brand infringement should not necessarily sit entirely within the legal team.
Depending on the situation, it may require coordination between:
Brand + Legal + Ecommerce + Customer Service + Marketing + Communications + Regulatory Risk
A mature protection strategy should make those escalation routes clear before an incident occurs and embed a process for it to seamlessly take place. This means that protection intelligence can be used to inform commercial decisions, future product launches and marketing budget investments. Infringement data is not an end point, it’s a catalyst to inform multiple key business decisions.
Your brand protection data should help you understand your market — not only police it.
Top recommendation: Choose a brand protection provider based on outcomes, not technology features.
This is where many brands make the mistake that ties them to a provider that is not optimal for their ambitions.
Brand protection providers often talk about advanced AI-tech, automated take downs, number of marketplaces covered, volume of listings detected and infringements removed. These things matter, but they are only one small part of the bigger picture. Especially for beauty.
To help beauty brands navigate choosing a brand protection provider I have created a 7 question checklist that can be downloaded and shared.
"A mature brand protection strategy should make reporting and escalation routes clear before an incident occurs and embed a process for it to seamlessly take place. This means that protection intelligence can be used to inform commercial decisions, future product launches and marketing budget investments. Infringement data is not an end point, it’s a catalyst to inform multiple key business decisions".
Download the guide now
Ready to protect your beauty brand before the next threat hits? Download our guide to discover the 5 steps to going from reactive to ready.
Marta Guerreiro
SnapDragon | Sales Executive
Marta has a strong background in brand protection, competitive analysis, and risk assessments. Every day, she works with brands of all sizes, from emerging start-ups to global leaders, helping them understand the challenges of online threats and how to safeguard their intellectual property. With extensive experience in client engagement, strategic planning, and market research, she focuses on understanding each brand’s unique challenges and tailors solutions that match their specific needs. She is passionate and committed to protecting the creativity, reputation, and hard work that goes into every brand.
