Open luxury

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Daisy Alioto interviews James Firestein, a luxury authentication expert and founder of OpenLuxury.

If you spend any time consuming what could be termed “fashion TikTok” or memes from the extended Throwing Fits universe, you may feel like you are in the trenches of Dupe Discourse™ but you would be wrong. The true soldiers? The handbag authenticators.

OpenLuxury is a luxury resale platform with an image-based authentication service, which can verify handbags and accessories from 43 different designer brands. Customers submit photos of their items (or of online listings they’re interested in purchasing) with close-up details of the hardware and construction. They can also include comments like "It smells funny," or "I don't like the way the leather feels." The process is almost forensic, and the submitted images are compared with the original goods. I reached out to James Firestein at OpenLuxury to talk about his customer base and how technology is changing the authentication business.

Firestein says there has been a lot of scaremongering in the press, perpetuating the idea that counterfeits are getting so good that they can’t be spotted anymore. “Even with super fakes, they will never be able to get the same quality because they're not working with the same budgets,” he says. “There are always going to be ways to tell the difference between the two. It's just a matter of finding the right expert with the right level of expertise and the right scope.”

A condensed version of our conversation below.

Daisy Alioto: How did you get into this business?

James Firestein: I went to Parsons School of Design, and there I learned basic craftsmanship— the difference between a luxury product, a bridge tier product, and a mass market product. I was really fascinated by luxury products and this idea of craftsmanship, heritage and brand identity that goes a little bit deeper. When I got a call from a friend to join the team at an auction house working in luxury accessories, I took it. Through that, I got to meet a lot of authentication experts because we authenticated everything that we took in.

My next job after that was directly working for an authentication team, really learning in the trenches. And then, slowly, over the four or five years that I was there, I went from being an associate all the way to the director of the department.

DA: When I was looking at your site, I saw that you don't charge more for Hermès authentication. I actually didn’t know that was a thing. Can you explain why some people charge more for that?

JF: The main reason seems to be a justification around specialization with Hermès being such a highly counterfeited brand. I think that is why most of the companies' upcharge for that service, but that’s not our ethos. Hermès is my bread and butter brand. It’s the brand I started with and learned the most about through my career. I don’t want to upcharge for a brand I know so well.

DA: How recent in the history of authentication is it for there to be a process that's purely photo based?

JF: Pretty new, although it goes back in certain circles. I would say the transition really happened in the late 2000s, but there were photo authenticators slightly before that.

DA: Are there any shifts in which brands are being duped because of the popularity of certain houses over time?

JF: Absolutely. The gap in the timeline between something becoming popular and something being heavily counterfeited is closing dramatically. Counterfeiters, especially in Korea and Italy, can get new counterfeits out within a month [of a product’s release]. It's pretty insane.

Right now it's kind of hard to say because it always shifts, but definitely Gucci, definitely Prada. Still Hermès because that's a high value brand. I'm seeing more Bottega counterfeits, which I think is in correlation with their resurgence and popularity after their rebrand. And Saint Laurent.

DA: What is the average age of your customer?

JF: Average age is younger. I would say probably anywhere from 30 to 38 based on our demographic data. The second-largest group would be 18 to 24s. So we're pretty young in terms of demographic, although it really runs the gamut.

DA: How many of the people that are using your service are trying to verify images off of listings on sites like The RealReal or Poshmark versus a picture of a bag they already bought?

JF: Very few, and that's a little concerning to me, but for us at least, it hasn't been a significant number. Maybe around 10% or less. It's mainly people who have bought something, felt suspicious about it, and then brought it to us to make sure.

There’s urgency, especially with resale sites because there's that pressure that anybody can put it in their cart at any time. It's a one of one unit. I also think return policies have been pretty lax in the past couple years. So that's contributed to the “buy now, regret later” kind of phenomenon.

DA: What are the key technology drivers behind dupes getting better? Which technologies are helping brands keep up with them?

JF: I would say it’s more of a supply chain driver at the moment, but I can definitely see AI helping counterfeiting in the near future, if it's not already happening.

The brands themselves have their own solutions, whether it's microchipping, RFID chipping, or a blockchain. Some brands just change their manufacturing every couple of years so that they can combat counterfeits a little bit better.

However, counterfeiters are already duping the microchips. Louis Vuitton went the microchipping route and almost immediately we started seeing counterfeits with good dupes of the Louis Vuitton website and what the microchip looks like, the code that comes up on your NFC reader. Technically, a lot of that information is also only really readable internally by Louis Vuitton, so it doesn't really help the third party authenticator like myself.

I think the biggest thing that's going to change in the next couple of years for authentication is image-based AI. That's already been happening with companies like Entrupy who are third-party. However, the technology's going to get so much better.

The Dirt: The proof is in the pudding—and the purse.

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