Couple say they lost £100k to online design theft

A design company said its work has been copied and added to thousands of cheap products being sold on online shopping sites.

Amanda and Frank Mountain, who run York-based Lola Designs which creates artwork for greeting cards, said they had lost out on £100,000 of sales due to online design theft.

They said they felt there was little they could do to stop the sales, with change needed to make sites hosting products more accountable.

A spokesperson for Temu, one of the platforms the couple said hosted products featuring its designs, said Lola was one of thousands of companies it proactively protected with round-the-clock monitoring and intellectual property checks.

Mrs Mountain said: "We've had more than 50 of our designs stolen that have been put on thousands of products that have been sold. We've lost an estimated £100,000 in sales.

"I was completely shocked. It wasn't just one design here and there. It's mass industrial copying."

The couple have built up their business over the last decade and now supply major retailers and ship their products as far afield as New Zealand, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Inspiration for the designs comes from Mrs Mountain's love of animals and nature.

"There's a piece of me in every design I do, so it feels like every time someone does this they're taking a piece of me," Mrs Mountain said.

The couple brought the case to the attention of their local MP, Labour's Rachael Maskell, who raised the issue in Parliament in November.

Creative Industries Minister Chris Bryant said the government was committed to a strong intellectual property regime.

Mr and Mrs Mountain have since met with the UK Intellectual Property Office which said it was continuing to engage with e-commerce sites to remove products featuring stolen designs.

Mr Mountain said: "We're losing around one in every 10 sales to people who've taken our designs and sold products on these platforms. This is happening on an industrial scale.

"That's a tenth of our earnings. It's a huge hit for us.

"We think these online market places should be held to account for those losses and they should be legally required to pay compensation."

A spokesperson for Temu, owned by the China-based PDD Holdings, said: "We've set up a specialised system dedicated to the protection of intellectual property rights and an associated reporting structure.

"These systems act as swift, responsive mechanisms to address any intellectual property infringement claims made by rights holders or consumers."

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