IP and Brand Protection for a Luxury Maison

The challenge

A luxury maison was seeing prototypes and details of unreleased collections surface on parallel channels, alongside counterfeit goods of rising quality on marketplaces. The suspicion was a leak somewhere along the creative and production chain.

That chain was extended and cross-border: in-house ateliers, third-party workshops, materials suppliers and outside agencies, across different countries and with uneven security. There was no single view of who could access imagery, technical drawings and samples.

My approach

I mapped the IP lifecycle — from sketch to sample to production — identifying where sensitive files were created, shared and stored, and with which third parties.

On the most critical content I introduced tighter access controls, traceability and, where useful, markers that let a leaked asset be traced back to its point of release — all without slowing the creative work.

In parallel I stood up brand monitoring across the web, marketplaces and social, with an enforcement process to take down fraudulent domains and counterfeit listings, coordinated with the client’s legal teams.

The engagement reduced the internal leakage surface and made the detect-and-remove cycle repeatable, turning brand protection from a reaction into a continuous process.