Miami, Florida, Coral Gables Retailers at Merrick Park, Nordstrom Office Retailer retail display of Birkenstock sandals.
Jeff Greenberg | Universal Images Group | Getty Pictures
Birkenstock, the iconic sandal maker launched in 1774, filed its paperwork for an IPO on Tuesday, and warned traders of the pitfalls posed by counterfeit brands who use social media to encourage their solutions.
The footwear company, which was commenced in Germany and is now dependent in London, programs to go community on the New York Stock Exchange, beneath ticker symbol “BIRK.”
Birkenstock has very long struggled to protect its mental residence, as copycats have taken gain of the brand’s recognition and premium rates to check out and undercut the business with more affordable options. In its prospectus, Birkenstock states that some of the levels of competition will come from “personal label offerings” from suppliers, but there are also “knock-off products” that are thieving its IP and trying to convince people on Facebook and in other places on the net that the objects are genuine.
“In the previous, third parties have established websites to target end users on Facebook or other social media platforms with ‘look alike’ websites meant to trick consumers into believing that they ended up purchasing Birkenstock goods at a steep lower price,” the filing mentioned. “Should really counterfeit goods be productively marketed on e-commerce platforms managed by third functions, our models and status could be harmed.”
Birkenstock will not identify Amazon anyplace in the 206-website page (in addition footnotes) filing, but it does say that it has “refrained, and we may possibly in the future refrain, from utilizing certain 3rd-bash web-sites to distribute our products and solutions owing to the offering of counterfeit solutions on this sort of platforms.”
Seven yrs back, Birkenstock publicly stop Amazon in the U.S. owing to an eruption of counterfeit and unauthorized product sales on the internet site. The corporation also claimed at the time that it would no for a longer period enable licensed Birkenstock merchants to offer on Amazon.
“The Amazon marketplace, which operates as an ‘open market,’ produces an atmosphere in which we practical experience unacceptable organization tactics which we think jeopardize our model,” then-Birkenstock United states of america CEO David Kahan wrote in a memo on July 5, 2016, resolved to “our valued Birkenstock partners.”
Kahan, whose title is now President Americas, went on to say that “policing this activity internally and in partnership with Amazon.com has established extremely hard.”
Prior to its departure from Amazon, legions of Chinese sellers had been endorsing Birkenstock’s flagship Arizona sandal for $79.99, or $20 under the retail value, in accordance to CNBC’s reporting at the time.
Since 2016, in accordance to the prospectus, Birkenstock has “drastically expanded” its direct-to-consumer efforts in e-commerce in the U.S. For the fiscal yr finished Sept. 30, 2022, that channel represented 38% of profits, the enterprise reported, adding that “a single of our strategies is to keep on to increase the proportion of our revenues from e-commerce.”
Subsequent to the Amazon clash, Birkenstock offered a majority stake in the business to LVMH-backed personal fairness agency L Catterton in February 2021. Right after the IPO, L Catterton will continue on to personal a majority of Birkenstock, in accordance to the filing.
“We see ourselves as the oldest start-up on earth,” the organization claimed in the filing. “We are a manufacturer backed by a family tradition of a quarter of a millennium with the resilience, timeless relevance, and credibility of a multigenerational business enterprise.”
Fb guardian Meta is very well knowledgeable of the endeavours taken by counterfeiters on its platform. In 2021, Fb and luxury brand Gucci submitted a joint lawsuit in California, alleging that a consumer of Facebook’s U.S. web sites was applying the platform to market fake Gucci merchandise.
The organizations explained in a assertion that over a million “items of articles had been eradicated from Facebook and Instagram in the very first 50 percent of 2020, based mostly on hundreds of experiences of counterfeit material from brand name proprietors, which include Gucci.”
In the six months finished March 31, Birkenstock’s income climbed 19% to 644.2 million euros ($693.2 million). Internet profits over that stretched dropped 45%, mostly thanks to a international trade reduction.
View: Birkenstock information for U.S. IPO on NYSE
