Brand Protection on a Small Brand's Budget

The quote was 4,800 pounds for a 3-month "brand integrity audit", and Esme read it twice in the car park before she drove home.

Her business made 61,000 pounds last year. She makes screen-printed tea towels, by herself, in a unit she shares with a bookbinder. The copies she'd found, 6 of them, were selling for 9 dollars against her 26.

"They wanted 8% of my turnover to tell me what I already knew," she said. "I knew where the copies were. I'd found them on my phone in bed."

She was right to walk out, and not because the firm was dishonest. They were selling the enterprise version of a problem that, at her size, costs almost nothing to handle and a weekend to learn.

The first hour is free and it's most of the value

Before any money moves, do this. It takes about 60 minutes and it replaces the first half of any audit you'd pay for.

Pick your 3 most-copied products. Not your whole range. The ones that sell, because those are the ones worth copying.

Reverse-image search the hero shot of each. Upload the file to Google Lens and to TinEye. TinEye sorts by first-seen date, which is the free way to show your version came first. Then run Bing Visual Search, because it crawls differently and surfaces sites Google has quietly deprioritised.

Search your own invented words. Colourway names, model numbers, made-up material names. If you called a print "Fenwater", search Fenwater. A copycat working at speed lifts the text and keeps the signature. This is the single highest-yield search in the whole exercise and it costs 4 seconds.

Search your exact product title in quotes on each marketplace you sell on, and on the 2 or 3 you don't.

Write the results in one spreadsheet, by seller. Shop name, seller ID, listing URL, price, the date you looked, and a screenshot saved in a folder named after the shop. Not named after the listing. The listing will vanish and the seller will not. The relisting problem is why that filing choice is the one that pays off 3 months later.

You now have a count. Esme's was 11, not 6, and 4 of the 11 were the same shop under 2 names.

The three things to buy, in order

Nothing, at first. Genuinely. The first notice you send costs 30 minutes and no money. If the copy used your photograph, you have copyright from the moment you took the picture, and in the US the DMCA route under 17 U.S.C. 512 requires no registration to send a notice. Fill in the platform's form, attach the evidence, sign it. DMCA or trademark? is the 2-minute decision about which form.

A trade mark registration, if copycats are using your name. This is the one spend I'd argue for early, because a copyright notice can only remove a listing that used your photograph, and a copycat who reshoots the product and keeps your name is untouchable without a registration. A UK application filed online costs 205 pounds for one class as of the fee change on 1 April 2026, with 60 pounds for each additional class, per the Intellectual Property Office's published schedule. One class, your own name, done yourself through the IPO's online service. For an EU trade mark the cost is higher and EUIPO publishes the current schedule, so check it rather than trusting a number in a blog post.

That registration is what gets you into the platform programmes. Amazon's Brand Registry, eBay's VeRO, Etsy's reporting portal and Alibaba's IP Protection platform all want to see a right before they'll act on a name.

A scheduled search, once the manual version has broken you. It will. The searching isn't the cost, the sorting is. Run Lens on 15 images and you'll get several hundred results, most of them your own footprint, and you'll stop by week 3. What changes the economics is the scoring and grouping, so the review is 10 minutes a week rather than an afternoon a month.

Tools in this category start around 99 dollars a month. Brand Protection Tools, which Verity AI runs, is 99 dollars for 1 brand and 10 products on a weekly scan, with no setup fee and no contract, and it does a free single-product scan that returns a count rather than an estimate, which is a reasonable way to find out whether you have a problem worth 99 dollars. It searches Etsy and Alibaba.com today; AliExpress, Temu, eBay and Amazon are next on the list rather than live, which is the question to put to any vendor before you pay. The first 20 paying customers keep it at 79 dollars for as long as they stay.

I'd be slightly suspicious of me saying that, given we run it, so compare it against the manual hour above. If an hour a month by hand covers your range, do that instead. The tool earns its keep at the point where the sorting is the bottleneck, not before.

The three things not to buy

A multi-country trade mark portfolio. Register where you sell and where you manufacture. A mark in 14 territories for a business turning over 60,000 pounds is a cost with no enforcement behind it, because you were never going to litigate in Vietnam.

Monitoring with a coverage map you can't verify. Ask which platforms are searched today, by name, and what the schedule is. Not which platforms are "supported". If the answer is a logo wall, assume the live coverage is narrower than the wall, and ask them to put the live list in the contract.

Anything that files the notice for you. This is the dealbreaker, not a preference. A takedown notice carries a penalty of perjury under 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3), and section 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly misrepresents liable for the damages it causes. A product that signs that on your behalf, using facts it can't check, has automated 4 minutes of typing and handed you a liability. Human in the loop, done properly is the longer version of why that line belongs in the code.

The free asset that does the most work

One page on your own site, listing your official stores and your authorised stockists, by name, with links.

That's it. 300 words, a stable URL, kept current.

It's the thing a customer can check, the thing a platform reviewer can read, and the thing an AI assistant can quote when a buyer asks whether a shop is legitimate. It also halves the noise in your own match reports, because the sellers you've already approved stop showing up as findings.

Nearly nobody has one. It costs an afternoon and it's the highest-return item on this entire page. How copycat listings leak into AI answers explains why it matters more than it looks.

The cadence that survives contact with a real week

Monthly, 30 minutes, same day each month:

• reverse-image search your top 3 products
• search your invented words
• check the status of anything you filed last month: down, back, or contested
• update the spreadsheet, by seller

Quarterly, 1 hour:

• widen to your full range
• look at your repeat sellers and decide whether any has enough history to escalate as a repeat infringer rather than listing by listing
• re-read your official-stockists page and fix what's changed

That's the programme. It is not impressive and it works, which is the usual relationship between those two properties.

What happened to Esme

She filed on 7 of the 11. 5 came down. 1 was rejected because the seller had reshot the product and dropped her name, so she had nothing to claim. 1 produced a counter-notice and came back after a fortnight, which is what 17 U.S.C. 512(g) requires the platform to do unless you've gone to court, and she hadn't.

She registered the name in one class, by herself, on the IPO website, in about 40 minutes.

Then she built the stockists page, which is 4 shops and a sentence saying that Fenwater tea towels are never sold under 20 pounds by anyone she's approved.

Total spend: the registration fee. Total time: a Saturday, then half an hour a month. The 4,800 pound audit would have produced a document that said roughly what her spreadsheet says, and no spreadsheet after it.

If you want the same thing as a sequence rather than a set of principles, the 30-day plan puts it in order. And the reason this is more urgent than it was 2 years ago sits in When the AI shopping assistant recommends the fake.