How Sentryc helps the Paperlike team to protect their brand

Company story

Artists and creative people work extensively on their iPads with a specific pen, the Apple Pencil. However, even occasional users who like to write by hand appreciate this tool. A large target group that feels a common pain: Tablet surfaces are too smooth. What makes for brilliant image quality in videos and photos weighs heavily in freehand editing and creates an unaccustomed writing experience. When writing and drawing on the iPad, Paperlike’s specially developed screen protector feels as if the surface is made of paper and gives the user more control and sensitivity while providing the same picture quality.

CEO Jan Sapper founded Paperlike in 2017. The passionate note taker with a penchant for digitalisation experienced the problem with the smooth surface during every iPad test. “I didn’t want to buy an iPad until Apple offered a solution, but nothing happened”, says Sapper. So, he took the initiative into his own hands, did research as a private individual and after a long research found partners for production. He was and is involved in the production of every version of his screen protectors.

The financing of the first production batch was to be secured by a two-week crowdfunding campaign with a target amount of € 4,000. At the end of the campaign, Sapper’s business idea reached a starting capital of € 60,000, fifteen times the initially estimated amount. It was clear that the needs of the tablet customers were much higher than previously expected. The business, which Sapper had planned as an evening sideline, grew into a company with several employees thanks to the financing and the enormous demand.

In the first year, the issue of brand protection did not seem relevant to Sapper. In 2018, the second year of business,  when sales went through the roof due to successful influencer marketing via YouTube, the brand was to be registered. Sapper first secured the German trademark rights with his trademark lawyer Dr. Holscher from Hamburg. Once this was achieved, they set their sights on protecting the brand throughout Europe and in the USA, being their biggest sales markets. After submitting the necessary documents they heard the surprising news: They only had one month left to secure their claims to the trademark and to have it correctly registered in the American registry – Meanwhile a Chinese company was trying to protect “Paperlike” as a trademark for the same product categories as well, most likely to brazenly copy Sapper’s business idea.

Challenges

With the support of Holscher and his American on-site lawyers, they put a stop on the attempted brand theft. This was an important step, since trademark infringements started occurring on almost all online marketplaces in the same year. It is important to know that platform operators such as Amazon or Alibaba are not actively taking action against counterfeiters and their listings. Companies worldwide are primarily personally responsible for researching, documenting and reporting the counterfeit listings. “I think it is good that the sovereignty over the prosecution of plagiarism lies with the manufacturers, not with the providers and online marketplaces,” states Sapper. “We know best who has the license to sell our products and who is allowed to use our brand name.”“Tracking”, adds his trademark lawyer, “requires a considerable amount of work on the international stage. Trademark rights are territorial rights and we specialise in the protection and enforcement of these rights with our worldwide network of long-standing colleagues. It is fun and immensely important  to help start-ups to ensure that the success of their innovations is only theirs and not for their imitators.”

Some online marketplaces give manufacturers the opportunity to check offers for authenticity or brand abuse. To do this, they scan all offers, check them in list form and report trademark infringements. So far, however, this has only been done manually. Each offer has to be checked and reported individually and even then it is not certain whether the listing actually gets removed. The first selection on Amazon in 2019 brought 800 listings to light. “Even if the platform operators do everything in their power“,  Sapper explains “some obvious false offers were not taken down even after our fifth report and since there are no personal contacts, we had to wait weeks for a feedback from the marketplace”.

Solution

For Jan Sapper it is important that his customers receive the original quality of the screen protectors that he developed. To ensure this, his company generates 80% of its turnover via its own website. After all, negative customer reviews of the victims of articles with inferior quality, which lure with “Paperlike” in the product description, fall back on his own brand. An intervention in the evil machinations of the brand pirates was urgently needed, as a flood of copycats pushed onto the market in 2018, in line with the booming social media marketing. “Both counterfeiters and suppliers of other screen protector films must understand that it is not acceptable to use our brand”, Sapper explains. “Some don’t even mean any harm, but they must be made aware that they cannot use the Paperlike brand to sell their own products.”

Brand protection expert Jens Holscher recommended that Sapper should work together with the Berlin-based technology company Sentryc. With its brand protection software, Sentryc automatically scans more than 120 international online marketplaces and social networks for conspicuous features that could indicate trademark infringements. This includes company names, keywords, detailed descriptions, prices but also hidden links. “Through these processes, we were able to enforce our trademark rights sustainably and efficiently”, explains Dr. Holscher. “It was exactly what Paperlike urgently needed at that time. The software can be accessed via an online panel and is not dependent on internal company data. An integration into Paperlike’s corporate structure was therefore not necessary. Initially Sentryc only received the information about the corresponding search request from Paperlike. After a few test rounds for the integrated machine learning, the software scanned all internationally listed offers in the countries relevant for Paperlike automatically.

Outcome

Offers with titles that contain the term Paperlike and are clearly aimed at the corresponding screen protector have since then been successfully prosecuted and forced to cease and desist by Paperlike. “Although we haven’t had registered our trademark in China at that time, we were indeed able to remove infringing offers from Alibaba”, Sapper reports. Since the sellers also sold their products to Europe via Alibaba, Paperlike was able to enforce its rights only with its European trademark. In the first month, Paperlike was able to remove several thousand false listings on Alibaba. Sapper immediately put the retailers on the blacklist. What is meant here is a filter that checks new listings from the same manufacturer for similar features and automatically removes them if the comparison is positive. All other false offers disappeared within 24 hours by clicking on the “Take Down” button.

Another valuable feature for a business that only wants to establish itself in a certain product category and does not want to take action against products in other categories with similar branding: The Sentryc software can add exceptions. Licensed retailers or offers are flagged and will not be targeted via the whitelist. Innocent people are recognised as such and all Paperlike partners and licensees worldwide stay untouched. The Paperlike team receives regular reports on current figures and sources always via the dashboard. For civil or criminal prosecution in drastic cases, all relevant data ,including screenshots of suspicious offers, is documented by Sentryc.

In order to differentiate fake offers from the original product even more clearly and easily, Sapper will engrave the Paperlike logo into the film in the future. This will make the next generation of screen protectors, which is already in development, even more copy-proof. “Even registrations in countries with weaker sales are now beneficial, because the brand protection software allows us to independently stop illegal uses worldwide. Sentryc is exactly the right tool to show the world that Paperlike is a protected brand whose protection is regularly and sustainably defended!”