Duplication consternation for top swimwear designer

By: Krystal Sanders

Original Article on thewest.com.au - read the article on The West Australian here.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in Jessica Williamson’s case it feels like downright theft.

It’s been a whirlwind for theowner and designer of Ete Swimwear who has just celebrated the label’s second anniversary. Within her first week of launching, the Southern River resident was contacted by New York Fashion Week scouts to show at an Australian showcase.

She was also a 2017 finalist in Telstra’s Young Business Women and is currently nominated for WA Young Achiever. In fact, her business has grown 900 per cent in the past two years, and has her swimwear stocked with major US outlets Pacsun and Lulu’s.

But her success has come with some surprising competition. Overseas websites including Alibaba appear to have directly ripped off her designs, even directly lifting her images from her website to create their own wholesale products to sell.

“The first time it happened I was on holiday and it just kind of ruined the whole day. I was stressing out I was crying, I didn’t know how to handle it,” she told AAA.

“I saw my bikinis on another model and I thought ‘I didn’t send my model my bikinis’.

“I sent a pretty quick email to the company asking what was going on and why do they have my designs and in that instance it was actually that the factory I was using was selling my stuff out the back door to other companies.

“I quickly changed factories and now I’m pretty happy with my factory, but the problem is China is very good at copying so they’ll just take an image and replicate it...”

Williamson said she receives links to images daily of her designs “being ripped off” and while she has had meetings with lawyers, she simply cannot afford the cost.

“I just send an email kind of outlining they are infringing on my copyright and using my images and just hope that they will remove it,” she said.

She hires good models and photographers to fly to destinations for her photo shoots. “So it’s quite a lot of money and it just sucks when people steal your images and your designs,” she said.

“Because they haven’t had to pay for samples, they have had to spend hours and hours painting prints.”