More Than Paperwork: How To Treat IP As An Asset #562

When a product takes off, copycats are rarely far behind. The team behind memobottle learnt this early. Their slim, rectangular water bottle was designed to slip neatly into briefcases and handbags, instantly recognisable as their own. But uniqueness attracts attention from low-cost imitators. Today, Co-founder Jonathan Byrt explains how a manufacturing complexity became a quiet moat that kept poor-quality imitations at bay.

In Today’s Playbook:

• How memobottle turned complex manufacturing into its best defence
• Why Quad Lock’s brand recognition outperforms any patent
• The operational moat behind Tinyme’s personalised production
• What Legalite’s Marianne Marchesi says about auditing hidden IP assets
• Why smart operators see IP not as paperwork, but as a foundation for growth

Connect with Jonathan & Jesse
Explore memobottle
memobottle’s main episode #545
Quad Lock episode #117
Tinyme episode #465

Chapters

• 0:00 Sponsor: Shopify Platinum Partner
• 1:01 The Copycat Problem in E‑commerce
• 2:26 IP as Growth: Memo Bottle
• 4:34 Brand Moat Over Patents: Quad Lock
• 6:40 Process Moats: Tinyme’s Speed Advantage
• 8:44 Audit Your IP Assets and Data
• 10:36 Playbook Recap and Community Invite

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Sure, you can stay up late tinkering with your Shopify store or have your friend's cousin design from a template for you. But what if you're serious about Shopify? The kind of serious where it's responsible for tens of millions of dollars of your business's revenue, both online and offline. You need a serious Shopify partner. That's why we at Ad DeCart are so happy to be partnering with Convert Digital. Convert Digital has been named a Shopify Platinum Partner. It's a status that's held by fewer than 30 agencies worldwide. That means Convert are the go-to for brands like Age, Honey Badette, Shopo, and Gander, who need to not only optimize Shopify, but innovate with it. So if you are ready to get serious with Shopify, Convert Digital are your platinum partner team. Visit convertdigital.com.au and have a chat with their newly crowned Shopify Platinum Partner team. In a world of Timu and Shein and Amazon, I think we're all pretty scared around being ripped off by bigger players with bottomless pockets and really competitive natures, especially when we go to the effort to create something brand new in e-commerce. It's very easy to think that we've come up with something totally unique and that we've got this clear space, clear market to go ahead and grow a brand. And how many times have we heard of people who have been ripped off? And it's not just the big players, we have it by some of our retail players at home as well. There are countless stories on it. Yet, the one thing that I have found is that while we're all aware of it, the idea of IP protection doesn't come naturally to us. In fact, I think that we put it off until we think something's going to go wrong. It's almost like fire insurance. It's like it always happens to someone else, not us. However, we've had a couple of guests recently who have talked about IP and some of the troubles that they've got into without the proper IP protection. And I wanted to use this playbook to talk to it in a little bit more detail. So to kick off the conversation, I want to throw back to a conversation that I had with Jonathan Burt from Memo Bottle. They've got a really unique product. They've designed a water bottle that is designed to fit within briefcases. And if you see it, you will know that it's a memo bottle. It is distinct, it is unique. However, that doesn't stop it from being ripped off. Today we're diving into how e-commerce operators can think smarter about intellectual property and product protection. And to kick us off, let's go back to my conversation with Jonathan Burt from Memo Bottle, how their IP strategy became a foundation for global growth, not just a protection strategy. The memo bottle remains distinctive. 11 years on. You know, you see it in the wild and you go, that's a memo bottle. How have you protected that from a world where Timu and Sheehan have come in and tried to rip everyone off, as well as everyone else? We can call local retailers as well on it. Kmart have been done by it. How have you protected that image and that design so that you've maintained ownership of it over those 11 years?

SPEAKER_01: 3:14

There's a few different ways here, and like we we do have some imitations that have come out over the years. No like solid brands, they're sort of like there have been the the Timu style products, but they've been produced in a different way and a really poor quality, I like to say so myself. But the biggest thing I think for us is that's helped protect us is that the bottle is actually extremely difficult to produce the way that we've done it. And it took us nine months to even produce the first type of bottles, and then doing the stainless steel bottles was even harder. And that's because it's not really a standardized manufacturing process that you'd get with a cylindrical bottle. And so they like to produce our bottles is a lot more expensive than a cylindrical bottle, for instance, and a lot of people just won't go down that route because it's it's too hard, it's too much of an investment, and they can you know go and rip someone else off in an easier way.

SPEAKER_02: 4:06

No one's dumb enough to do what we've done.

SPEAKER_00: 4:09

There's your moat, your competitive moat. Do something different.

SPEAKER_02: 4:12

Yeah, it is good, it keeps the really cheap imitations away unless they're produced in an inferior method. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 4:18

And then the other thing is like, you know, when we first found one of those imitations, we got our lawyers to go after them and sunk a bit of money into it. We've got IP, and it was just like it was like whack-a-mole in a way. They were just like, you'd pop, you get one down, another one will come up. And in the end, we just realized that we needed to win on brand and also speed. So we needed to just make sure that we were, you know, bringing out more products, making sure that we weren't just a single product brand. We needed to make sure that we had a full suite of products that, you know, was incredibly difficult to copy from you know someone else. You essentially create an ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02: 4:56

Yeah. That's been the journey over the last 18 months or so. Just bringing out that expanding that product range to evolve the brand into a reusable lifestyle brand, not just the water bottle brand that we were sort of known known for for the first seven or eight years.

SPEAKER_00: 5:09

I love it. And great advice there around IP because last week we talked to Marianne from Legal Light, and she talked a lot about IP and the importance of it. And you guys are living proof of how important that is when you've got something unique. All right, that is a brilliant insight from Jonathan around how not to use IP just as a protection mechanism for your brand, but as a foundation on how to enable it to scale and grow with that moat around it that will give investors, retailers, and everyone you're involved with more confidence that what makes you unique will stay unique to you. Over the years, we've had many conversations around IP. And there are a couple of insights that stood out to me that I just want to share here. One thing that keeps coming through is that while IP protection is really important in terms of the legal paperwork, it can often be expensive and difficult to enforce. And sometimes it is just a gray area where no matter how good your legal paperwork is, there will be arguments on there are slight tweaks or slight changes that make those copycats viable. One thing that they can't take from you, though, is your brand. And Rob Ward from Quadlock acknowledged that while patents are a great start, the fact that there are gray areas and that they are costly to enforce, his focus has been building a great brand so that when customers go searching for their products, they're not searching for iPhone bike. His focus has been about building a brand that's bigger than the design. So for example, instead of customers searching for iPhone bike mount, they're searching quadlock mount. His idea is that by building equity into the brand itself, that is something above and beyond IP that can never be taken away from him and is an even bigger moat than IP protection could ever be. I'm not saying IP protection isn't important, but if you're not also investing in brand as your protection mechanism around that, then you're missing a trick. The second piece here is invest in a product ecosystem or unique manufacturing processes that are hard to replicate. Yes, you might be able to rip off something in terms of a design, but there is so much more to a product that we know about. So a great example of this is from the team at Tiny Me. They make customized goods for children. So think about lunchboxes, school bags, and they can customize it with names, but also deliver it within a couple of days. And they do this because they have their own unique manufacturing process set up purely for personalization and they make sure that where they're manufacturing is close. So when they expanded to the UK, they made sure that they were manufacturing in the UK because that was a key part of what they were delivering. So while someone else might be able to spin up a personalized kids brand pretty quickly, no one will be able to match their speed and their reliability because they put years and years into that manufacturing process that's close to their customers. So protecting your brand and protecting your product is much more than just the design itself. That takes years and years to build up on. And the third thing to think about when protecting your IP is knowing what is an asset in your business. Marianne from Legalite talked a lot about IP, and it's a great episode if you want to get up to speed on this. We'll put a link in the show notes. But she talked about regularly doing an audit on what are the assets in your business. As in, if you're ripped off, what would actually damage you? This could obviously be your product design, but it could be everything from your customer data to your photography to your product descriptions. All of these things can be ripped off. And we know now with AI there are scrapers everywhere, and that that is all up for grabs. So understanding what assets are really valuable to you, putting in place protection mechanisms to copyright those items that are unique to you, and looking inwards at your own organization and making sure that you've got policies in place for you and your team so that we know exactly where and how they can use them. In an age where we don't want to hold back our team from using AI, we will need to put safeguards around what data can be and can't be used with AI tools, especially for those assets that are competitive edge and a legal responsibility for a business. So looking inwards at what your most important assets are for your business and putting protection and process in place to protect them and their IP is hugely important. So Jonathan's is a great story of looking at IP as a competitive advantage and a growth tool to get out and to put extra firepower behind your brand, not just award off those competitors. However, we also need to think about how do we create product ecosystems and manufacturing processes that protect beyond the product design itself? How do we invest in a brand that goes above and beyond the product itself? So even if the product does get ripped off, we've got such a strong brand and such a strong following that it'll never be quite the real thing. Imagine someone making rip-off coke. It'll never be the quite the real thing. And then lastly, have a look inside and understand what your most important assets are in your business. They might not always be physical and putting the right protection policies and processes in place to understand them before it's too late and they get leaked out. I think IP is actually really interesting and shouldn't be overlooked. You might just need to take the time and bring in some experts to understand how you can leverage IP, not just to protect your brand, but to grow your brand. Now, if you want to discuss more around everything e-commerce, including potentially how you use IP in your business, jump into the Add to Cart community. We have over 500 e-commerce professionals in there to talk about everything in e-commerce. It's free to join, and you can join up over on addocart.com.au. We would love to see you in there. We would love to hear your tips and your tricks around IP and maybe even your questions. Throw one out there. See what comes back at you. Join at addocart.com.au. Until next time, I'll see you then.