TAGD- Technology to prevent counterfeiting and provide real-time insights to resale markets

Counterfeiting is a serious problem, costing UK consumers £4.8bn, retailers £9.2bn each year and costing 86,300 UK jobs. Because people now buy so many items online, counterfeiters are able to pass off fake goods as genuine more easily than in a face-to-face transaction. Counterfeit goods can be dangerous and are often sold by organised criminal groups, also active in serious crime.

Consumers have an interest in eliminating counterfeit goods. They suffer financial loss when duped into buying counterfeit goods. Counterfeit goods' prevalence depresses prices when consumers wish to sell on items they no longer need.

Brands and retailers suffer direct loss from missed revenues and indirect loss due to reputational damage when their brand is copied extensively. Reseller sites too suffer direct financial loss having to compensate users who unwittingly buy counterfeit items and reputational damage as places where counterfeit goods can be bought.

Existing solutions either rely on physical tags, which counterfeiters have learned to copy or otherwise avoid, and serial numbers which can also be duplicated and faked. Our alternative proposition is to generate a unique number (TAGD ID) at point of first sale. Consumers can update this, should they wish to sell items on.

We will integrate with reseller sites, to display TAGD IDs when consumers want to check if an item is genuine or not. Fashion resale is predicted to be worth £50bn by 2025 and £100bn by 2030; the fastest growing segment of the fashion market. Without full-stack anti-counterfeit technology like ours, counterfeiting will dramatically slow this exponential growth.

Our technology will also allow brands to see how well different items perform in resale markets, which they have not been able to do previously.

We have filed a patent on our concept and now need to build a basic system to demonstrate the technology to partners. We cannot secure commercial funding or a joint venture to do this before proving the technology. In this project, we will build a 'front end' for the system and integrate with a partner's system to prove the technology works.

This will allow us to commercially fund development and scale up our system. Within five years we expect to achieve 100m users and annual revenues of £180m. These derive both from anti-counterfeit usage and brands paying for access to TAGD data.