How Laneige is taking on Temu counterfeiters

Julien Bouzitat, U.S. general manager of Laneige and Innisfree, told Glossy that the rise in cheap lookalikes sold on marketplace sites has grown over the past three years and has sharply followed the rise of the brand’s overall popularity. Counterfeiters appear to be most focused on classic and limited-edition flavors of the cult lip balm, as well as the brand’s Water Sleeping Mask face moisturizer. 

Unlike dupes, the colloquial term to represent products that look almost identical but lack the trademarked brand name and logo, these fakes are far harder for shoppers to detect. Often sold with deceptive images, and some only a few dollars less than the original, it’s easy for prospective and existing customers to be fooled into thinking they’re getting the real thing.

Like the beauty counterfeiting epidemic of the past decade, which targeted popular items like Kylie Lip Kits, Urban Decay Naked palettes, Ben Nye Banana Powder and MAC lipsticks, this revolving issue plaguing brands goes beyond a trademark fight. Cosmetic counterfeiters lack manufacturing oversight and accountability, and they have caused many well-documented issues for end users. Their lips have gone numb or become glued together, plus they’ve experienced chemical burns and, more commonly, skin rashes and eye infections. 

“Guarding against fake products is just as much about consumer safety and satisfaction as it is about preventing brand confusion in the marketplace,” Laneige’s Bouzitat said. 

Often described as “whack-a-mole” within industry circles, counterfeiting is an ongoing issue that tends to saddle the most popular brands and newest marketplace sites of the moment. Today, that’s Laneige and Temu. 

Amorepacific launched Laneige in 1994 and currently owns more than 25 brands including Sulwhasoo, Aestura and Hera. In 2015, the brand launched its Lip Sleeping Mask lip balm, which is currently available in a variety of flavors and sizes, stateside in Sephora and DTC. In January, Laneige announced Gen-Z actress Sydney Sweeney as its first-ever global brand ambassador, and it hosted a buzzy pop-up event at The Grove’s Glass House in Los Angeles in March. 

During Amorepacific’s first-quarter 2024 earnings call last month, the company announced a 40% year-over-year increase in revenue in its Americas market owed to a doubling of Laneige’s lip-care market share and the brand’s newest Sleeping Mask franchise, Bouncy & Firm moisturizer. In comparison, sales in South Korea declined by 2% and sales in greater China dropped by 19% during the same time. Last year Amorepacific’s revenue reached 911.5 billion KRW, or about $667.2 million.  

To protect the IP of the brand as it grows, as well as the safety of consumers, Bouzitat’s team at Laneige implemented a “robust and holistic intellectual property protection strategy” that includes industry monitoring and data collection and enforcing the removal of counterfeit and infringing products from various unauthorized online retailers and marketplaces, including Temu, as well as litigation for repeat offenders. This requires both external IP protection vendors and a robust team within Amorepacific. 

Understanding the latest fakes is also valuable, so the Laneige team routinely orders products from counterfeit vendors to understand what consumers are receiving, leaving them better prepared for customer emails and DMs about potentially fake products. 

But despite the effort to keep counterfeiters at bay, consumers are fascinated with the concept of fakes. As of this week on TikTok, “Laneige lip mask” had more than 109 million posts while “fake Laneige lip mask” was on its heels with 72 million posts. 

Popular YouTubers have turned the phenomenon into a can’t-miss content franchise. Creator James Welsh, who has 1.5 million Youtube subscribers, reviewed fake and dupe products ordered from Temu in a recent video that received more than 250,000 views. In the video, he describes fakes and dupes from Thayers, Paula’s Choice, Glow Recipe and Laneige as “gross,” “smelly,” and scented like “cigarette smoke” or “old-fashioned ‘90s perfumed skin care.” 

Creators discussing Laneige fakes on social media often describe an off-putting texture reminiscent of too-hard coconut oil or too-liquidy canola oil, instead of the thick balm. Hundreds of comments discussing the fakes flood posts on TikTok and spill over onto Laneige’s official platforms.  

“We’ve seen an increasing number of comments on social media asking if the Laneige products displayed on Temu are legitimate,” said Laneige’s Bouzitat, who called consumer education as an ongoing struggle. Laneige does not sell on Temu and never has, which it explains to inquiring customers. But taking on an educational campaign isn’t commonly practiced as it can simply illuminate the problem to a large swath of oblivious customers. But the latest step of Laneige’s strategy strikes a better balance. 

Last week, Amorepacific launched a new custom, consumer-focused reporting website found at AmorepacificCounterfeitReport.com, which it soft-launched with a hyperlink on the bottom of its brand sites, including Laneige. 

The site includes a simple drop-down to collect contact information from the reporter, as well as details about the fake and a space to upload imagery. The Laneige team hopes this new site will make reporting the fakes more streamlined and make consumers feel they’re helping to solve the problem. 

According to Red Points, a copyright infringement vendor used by brands like Parlux hair tools, Foreo skin-care devices and Beautyblender makeup applicators to enforce IP, beauty counterfeiting is on the rise. 

Red Points does not work with Laneige, but is the largest IP vendor, based on volume, and tracks the industry closely. A representative told Glossy that the number of infringement violations for the beauty, personal care and beauty device categories have increased in the last few years with a compound annual growth rate of 62% between 2018 and 2023, including a major jump over the past 24 months. 

“Red Points’ data shows a 7.5% increase in infringements … between 2022 and 2023, which was especially led by the increase within the ‘beauty and personal care’ segment,” a representative from Red Points told Glossy. Additionally, according to Red Points, 40% of fakes came from China, the largest segment. In 2022 and 2023, there were 12% more Chinese counterfeit sellers and 26% more infringements, compared to the previous two years. 

Red Points currently sends more than 400,000 violations to marketplace sites and counterfeiters each month, said Daniel Shapiro, svp of strategic partnerships. Shapiro oversaw Amazon’s internal anti-counterfeiting program starting in 2011 and finds many parallels to the saturation of counterfeits on Temu today. 

“EBay and Amazon are blocking a ton of counterfeits every day because they’re very mature marketplaces. They put in processes and procedures and formulas to block the bad actors,” Shapiro told Glossy. The next generation of the marketplace site, including Shein, Temu and Shoppee, however, simply aren’t as advanced, Shapiro said. 

Temu is owned by Pinduoduo, which launched in the United States at the end of 2022 but has already become a household name thanks to a media blitz reported by Glossy’s sister publication, Modern Retail. For example, Temu spent more than $517 million in national advertising from September through December of last year, and the site had the most ads of any brand at the Super Bowl this year, which was the most-watched event since the 1969 moon landing. According to its 2023 earnings call, Pinduoduo’s revenue nearly doubled in 2023. 

Laneige’s Bouzitat calls Temu a partner in its anti-counterfeiting endeavor and told Glossy the site participates in listing removals. However, the organization of the removals requires massive resources from the brand. In the world of digital marketplaces, brands must protect themselves. Temu declined to comment or participate in this article. 

IP vendors like Red Points use AI to sort through listings, locate fakes through keywords and images, and submit requests to marketplace sites for removal. Yet products still make it to consumers thanks to Temu’s low-price distribution strategy. Since Temu ships directly to U.S. consumers from overseas and doesn’t use a U.S.-based distribution center, packages fall into the “de minimis” loophole: Packages valued at less than $800 receive tax exemptions and less oversight from U.S. customs, allowing products to slip in that are potentially counterfeit, illegal or tied to various human rights violations, like forced labor or child labor. 

“Temu and Shein are building empires around the de minimis loophole in our import rules, dodging import taxes and evading scrutiny on the millions of goods they sell to Americans,” Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher, who chairs a committee trying to root out the loophole, said in a statement last year. 

Currently, there is a bi-partisan effort to close the loophole, which could help reduce fakes and potentially drive up Temu pricing. But it is currently stalled in Congress, as reported by Time in February. 

Another possible solution may lie in the FDA’s mounting power through MoCRA, the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulatory Act. A representative from FDA told Glossy that “imported cosmetics must comply with the same laws and regulations that apply to those produced domestically,” and “all imported cosmetics are considered to be in interstate commerce.” The struggle lies in tracking and stopping them.

One way the FDA is working to increase the safety of our food system is through import alerts, which the FDA told Glossy they could potentially use for cosmetics in the future as MoCRA is fully rolled out this year. 

For example, when a product is imported, it is reviewed based on the product code written on the import form by the sender, and other factors, such as prior violations of the sender. Then, Customs and Border Patrol refers packages containing FDA-regulated products to the FDA, said Katlin McKelvie, Esq., partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington D.C. Currently, however, “FDA does not require prior notice for cosmetics or medical products to be imported into the United States,” she said. “In contrast, by law, the FDA requires prior notice for food imported into the United States.” 

This would be an expansion of a program already used for food, and putting cosmetic products on import alert would allow FDA staff to detain those products without physically examining them, McKelvie, Esq. told Glossy. 

Flagging potentially dangerous products from overseas vendors before they reach consumers could be as simple as implementing manufacturer listing requirements, which tells the FDA where a product was made and by whom. It’s a new power the FDA just won with MoCRA and is still rolling out. 

Between mounting bi-partisan pressure for better marketplace regulation, a booming digital security industry and the FDA exploring its power to keep dangerous fakes out of the U.S., the future of counterfeit products reaching the states is unclear. But for the brands fighting them, it’s a day-in and day-out battle.