Chinese Functional Skincare Brand FulQun Wage War Against Its Knockoffs

Recently, the Chinese skincare brand FulQun issued a follow-up announcement on the fake incident, saying that a large number of fake products of "Acne clearing and relieving essence" appeared on the market after receiving a report from users. FulQun has joined forces with law firms to collect evidence and will take up legal weapons to protect their rights.

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Founded in 2014, FulQun is a functional skincare brand under UNDERPROVED. FulQun put forward the slogan "If there is acne, use FulQun", and has been focusing on the development of effective care products for many years to improve acne skin.

Since 2019, FulQun has ranked top 3 in the wound dressing category for four consecutive years. In the 2021 Double Eleven Shopping Festival on Tmall, FulQun was listed on the Top 3 of the flagship store category lists on Tmall and 57,000 hot-selling masks were sold.

FulQun has passed the clinical authority verification of product efficacy and safety in dozens of large Grade-A tertiary hospitals across the country and has also been recognized by many dermatologists at industry conferences. In addition, in terms of consumer feedback, FulQun has won more than 20,000 recommendations on Xiaohongshu.

The core ingredient of FulQun is an antibacterial peptide (cell-penetrating peptide), which has undergone clinical trials in PEKING UNIVERSITY FIRST HOSPITAL, Beijing Friendship Hospital, and JIANGSU PROVINCE HOSPITAL. Its star items are "Acne clearing and relieving essence" and "MEDICAL HEALING FUNCTIONAL DRESSING" and so on.

The counterfeited product is one of FulQun's star items: the "Acne clearing and relieving essence", which was officially launched on October 15, 2021, selling over 130,000 units a week after going public. In November, it ranked 4th in TikTok's Product View List with 3.004 million views and 14.308 million sales.

During the 2021 Double Eleven Shopping Festival period, the "Acne clearing and relieving essence" was sold in more than 10,000 bottles in just one hour. In addition, it also won the ELLE Beauty Star of the Year Beauty Star - Glory New National Trend - Purifying Skin Renewal Award.

It may be the eye-catching performance of the "Acne clearing and relieving essence" that "good knockoff" appeared in the market only after about the essence's two-month going public.

On December 30, 2022, FulQun's WeChat Official Account released an article titled "Fight counterfeiting! Spent 50 yuan in Pinduoduo as an undercover. Maddening!" The article said that FulQun received some user feedback that they bought fakes of FulQun's acne soothing serum in unofficial stores on some e-commerce platforms. In order to safeguard the rights and interests of the majority of FulQun consumers, the Staff of FulQun personally experienced the whole process from ordering and receiving goods to communicating with customer service and summarized the common traps of selling fakes in stores.

The customer service of the fake store claims that the counterfeit products it sells are directly sold by the manufacturer, but they responded positively in the face of doubts after receiving the goods, only indicating that the use effect is the same. In order to dispel users' doubts, the customer service of the fake store even guides the user to scan the code to check the anti-counterfeiting. The QR code and the query website show that the purchased product is "genuine", but FulQun's side personnel found that the so-called query website is a counterfeit URL, not the official query address of FulQun. At this point, FulQun began to pay attention to the problem of products being counterfeited and recently formally took action to protect its rights.

Cosmetics are counterfeited/plagiarized, which will bring a loss of interest to the brand, resulting in uneven product reputation, resulting in a lack of consumer trust, thus damaging the brand reputation and image. At the same time, counterfeit and shoddy products also infringe on the legitimate rights and interests of consumers.

From January to December 2021, China reached 402.6 billion yuan in cosmetics retail sales, an increase of 14% compared with the same period last year. The huge market size and profit drive have led many lawbreakers and criminals to take legal risks and desperately risk the explosives of counterfeit brands, which has almost become a norm. If the cosmetics industry wants to develop benignly, it must ponder the following questions: how to protect the brand image, how to protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers, and how to combat the bad atmosphere of rampant counterfeits.