As designer accessories and sneakers merge into one large swirling storm of hype and desire—handbags and Jordans flying through the air like grail debris!—counterfeit sneakers are becoming one of the fashion industry’s biggest global threats. In December of last year, an unsealed federal complaint detailed a multiyear Department of Homeland Security investigation uncovering a massive counterfeit-sneaker ring spanning New York and Los Angeles. Had those Nike and Louis Vuitton sneakers been real, they would have been worth nearly half a billion dollars.
With the resale market for sneakers only growing, how does a consumer—or a brand, or the United States government, for that matter—combat the problem?
Entrupy, a start-up founded in 2016 to authenticate luxury goods through algorithm-based technology, thinks it has the answer. On Wednesday, the company announced a new solution—an actual product—designed to identify fakes and authenticate real sneakers. The product is a box they call Legit Check Tech, which works in tandem with a constantly updated system of algorithms developed for models of popular sneakers, from Jordans to Yeezys.
“We’re a team of about 30 people, mixed between being in the sneaker world, from the retail luxury world, from the data world,” co-founder and CEO Vidyuth Srinivasan said in an interview last week, at the company’s midtown WeWork. “We all come together, and we literally analyze every item, every pixel on every shoe, and then we say, ‘Okay, so this is what we have learned,’ and we apply that learning to algorithms.” Entrupy started with handbags and began exploring sneaker authentication about a year and a half ago. Handbags are a sensitive business—in fact, Entrupy is one of several businesses in which LVMH’s La Maison des Startups has invested in—but, Srinivasan said, “the need of trust and the need for verifying authenticity is the same” with sneakers.
“All of these big marketplaces and platforms where people are buying and selling—the fact that they have grown so much is in large part due to the checks that they do,” Srinivasan said. “That’s what creates that level of consumer trust. And what we have built is basically a way to augment and scale that up even more. We take human expertise, which is amazing in many cases, but it’s not repeatable and scalable. So we’ve automated that process,” he said, with algorithms. “And now we have this box.”
This box, indeed! What is this box? A 3" x 3" wooden box, modest in design, with rounded corners—friendly!—which purports to hold the secret to identifying the real-deal sneaker from its mere imitator. Srinivasan’s colleague, sneaker operations coordinator Rodel Camposagrado, put two pairs of Jordan 1 Cactus Jacks in front of me and asked me to guess the fake. It was barely possible to tell the difference between the two, but the shoddy, visible red stitching hanging out of the tongue on one pair seemed a little sus to me, as the kids say. Camposagrado took the one I thought was real, snapped a photograph of the size tag (and barcode) on the inside of the shoe, and placed the shoe in the brightly lit box, which looked like an indoor tennis court for dolls. He queued up an app on an iPod—#tbt!—and the app snapped photographs of the shoe from different angles at the tap of Camposagrado’s thumb. “It takes photos of every part of [the sneaker] that we think is important, depending on the brand or shoe or the style,” Srinivasan said.
The app requested that we put in the other shoe, and repeated the photography session. (I couldn’t help imagining a tiny British photographer inside yelling, “Give me authentic, baby!”) Within two minutes, we had our answer: “You are correct,” Camposagrado said. I had correctly identified the fake. Who’s the expert now, hypebeasts?!
Well...anyone with the machine. “We thought about who would use this, and how would they use it,” Srinivasan said. “You don't want to be in a position where you train someone. It needs to be very easy and quick."
But it isn’t just anyone with basic touchscreen skills that Entrupy has in mind. “Anybody who buys and sells at a certain volume,” Srinivasan clarified, is the target customer. So if you’re doing a brisk business moving secondhand sneakers through your living room, or if you’re dreaming bigger and looking to give Stadium Goods or Flight Club a run for their money, you might want the box. Entrupy is a few months away from formally launching the product, Srinivasan said—it will not be made of wood but something sturdier when it’s released—but an owner will enter a lease agreement with a price based on the number of boxes they want, and then pay on an authentication basis. (This is the same model the business uses for their handbag-authentication solution.)
Pretty nifty stuff—but can it truly disrupt the counterfeit market? As the Homeland Security investigation showed, fake sneakers are a global scheme with countless complicit parties, from the manufacturers themselves to the businesspeople importing the goods to the United States–based salespeople who stock them in stores. (Not to mention the lenient customs process in our fair ports!) Entrupy identifies counterfeits only if they’re brought to a seller with the technology—so all those boxes that made it through customs, allegedly packed with these hygge-worthy decorative vases but actually filled with fake Nikes? They can technically still move into the marketplace. Considering the robust nature of counterfeit production, they probably will.
Still, Entrupy hopes to move at a competitive pace—their commitment to continual algorithmic innovation is impressive. Counterfeit sneakers appear at the speed of fast fashion—a factory can churn out a new model within days (sometimes because they are making the fake sneakers right alongside the real ones, a category of products called yuandan). Entrupy’s team is constantly buying and studying fakes—Srinivasan wouldn’t reveal how they procured their counterfeit goods, but they buy the best of the worst—and updating the algorithms. It’s the kind of speed and constantly refined expertise that human expertise can’t match, he said. “We can support a new pair of sneakers from anywhere between a day to maybe a week after it's been released.
"We have so many, anywhere between 500 to about 1,200 data points on a per-shoe basis,” he continued. "Texture, materials, craftsmanship, color…” He paused. “We want to be a little sensitive about that, because we are also in a position where we don’t want to be giving tips to the counterfeiters.”
