Tony Wagner
No, so counterfeiters are thieves that just look for a quick way to make an easy buck. They don’t care about intellectual property rights, they don’t care about any of that. They’re going to try to get in and get out as quickly as they can.

So, with our products, when I spot counterfeits, it's usually one or two things.

Either a counterfeit like this one, where they're actually cloning or trying to clone actual trade dress by meaning of packaging and product directly.

Or…they are going to put our name on anything, then try to pass it off as a legitimate Buck knife. They will still use counterfeited trade dress, but in some instances there'll be some crazy Samurai-looking, you know, dragon print knife, something that obviously we would never do. But they will laser engrave Buck on the blade, put it in a fake Buck knife box, and on the surface level, people will look at it and go “Oh, well, that’s worth $7” and they’ll buy it. Then, when they send it back in for warranty work -because we have a forever warranty on all our products, we have to tell them -unfortunately- we didn’t make this..and it’s no covered under any warranty.

Tony Wagner
There are a couple of tools that you can use. I use an online web crawler tool that will scan the Internet using AI, for example. So the counterfeiters will use digital images, and every digital image has a fingerprint, so the crawler will find images that are known to be of fakes.

Once they find them, they'll automatically send either a cease and desist notice, or they’ll go to the marketplace and tell everyone “this is a fraud.” We can escalate all the way up to legal action.

Another way is using the Customs and Border Patrol. You can send in training videos to train their teams on what to look for. With the general public, I don't ever publicly give out the “tells” we use. Because, once you do that, the counterfeiters will make their products even harder to detect.

A good example is this box. It looks just like our legitimate boxes, right? Even to the slip case sleeve. We have magnetic boxes. They came up with a magnetic box.

What’s on the inside of the box looks almost exactly the same as what’s in ours. But there’s a right away “tell” to me: the inside has a shiny foil print. We don’t use foil print. The color’s also off, and we use crinkle cut paper. They do not. And the size of the box is off. There’s a bunch of different things.

But when you're shopping online you're basing it on a photograph. Visually there is no difference. Or they will steal photographs from our website, use those and people don’t know what they’re going to get.

By the time they get the knife, the company has changed its name and they're no longer reachable.

That’s a piece of how we fight counterfeiting. Another is through the American Knife and Tool Institute,. I'm the Buck Knife representative on their Committee for Anti Counterfeiting.

We members may compete in the retail space, but we are a coalition against counterfeiters.

So we share information, especially if we see someone counterfeiting. I find a lot of fakes using the tool that I have. When I see our competitors’ fakes, I notify my counterparts there and say, “hey, you need to look into this site. Here's the information,.”

We share that back and forth.

The goal behind that is simple: we know that we're not going to eradicate all of the fakes. But if we make it a pain in the ass for them to make money off of our industry, they'll move on to a different industry altogether because now they’ll have to work harder to make money. They don’t want to do that. They want to “get in, make some money, then get out.”

If we're putting up roadblocks every step of the way and catching them at every turn, then they're going to move off to , uh, archery, or they're gonna move on to something else, and then it'll be that industry's issue, but not knives.

Tony Wagner
Without getting too politically right or putting on my tin hat for conspiracy theories. I do know that the Chinese government will say they are holding up IP (Intellectual Property) rights. But they don’t.

If you understand Chinese politics, you understand that the state controls business, and the gets state funds from those businesses. A lot of those counterfeiting dollars come back to the state. So why would you cut off a revenue stream?

That’s just what we’ve found. Like I I mentioned companies will change their name, or the tooling will get passed from one factory to the next, to the next, the next. So..if we shut one factory down, the tooling has already moved down the street. Now, they’re making it -and maybe for our industry, too— because we all rely on imports to a certain degree to satisfy big box retailers.

You have to find a partner that you can trust with your intellectual property to make your tools for you. We've had some instances where some of our competitors didn't properly vet, and their partners are making their legitimate product and also selling it out the back door for pennies on the dollar.

Tony Wagner
In the knife space, specifically, it is in the millions of dollars. It hasn't quite reached the billions of dollars yet, because knives are a lower margin product than, let's say, automobiles or luxury watches or handbags and shoes. Counterfeiting there is rampant. There are whole industries that are built on catching those fakes and taking them down.

I was able to successfully have an entire shipment seized at one of the ports. It was over $180,000 worth of street value. But you're never going to stop it all.

We have to educate the American consumers that just because it's online doesn't mean you can trust it.

If the price is too-good to be true, you better believe it’s too-good to be true.

They’re clever about it. We have had videos hijacked where it’s CJ’s (CJ Buck) voice from a video we made seven years ago.

We’ve also had some counterfeiters claim that “Buck knives is going out of business - and we're clearing out inventory. That's why the prices are so good.”

So a consumer should only buy products from vetted retailers that you can trust that are authorized resellers of the product that you're looking to buy.

If you're just going on Amazon, or especially if you're just going on Temu or Alibaba, there are no authentic brands they’re selling -other than Chinese brands.

There are some China brands that sell on those sites. But they're selling at full retail, for what they would sell for it everywhere else. It isn't like, oh, I want a Kaiser knife and I'm going to pay $3 for it on, you know, Temu. If it’s legitimate, you’re going to pay what you would pay at a retailer.

If you find a Buck knife on temu for $15 or $30 or even $50, none of those are authentic. Consumers should avoid those marketplaces and only buy from the manufacturers directly or from authorized resellers.

Tony Wagner
Establish the value of your brand. Know what your brand is worth, and do everything you can to protect it. Because if you leave it up to somebody else, they will degrade your brand very quickly. To the point where the consumer will move to somebody else. It’s “once bitten, twice shy.”

If somebody buys a fake, they're going to automatically ascribe that fake to your brand.

As far as quality, price, et cetera, use the anti-counterfeiting tools that are available. Yes, there is a cost associated with it, but it depends on the value you ascribe to your brand. How much are you willing to pay to protect it?

Build a strong network that represents your brand in an authentic way that will also look out for you.

Buck has become a legacy brand and we’re very fortunate to have reached that level of brand awareness. But we also have brand evangelists.

We have a Buck Collectors Club and they act as ambassadors for the brand. They’re out in public, and they’re online, and they report a lot of those fakes back to us as well. So they’re sort of an organic watchdog group -and they educate other collectors on what to look out for, who to buy from, who can you trust…what to avoid.

But any brand that wants to grow, that’s concerned about counterfeits needs to do deep dives into the information. See what’s out there…know that it will never go away, but if you make it as hard as possible for counterfeiters to steal money from you, they’ll move on to something and someone else.