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Last updated on: June 8, 2022
Wish is one of the largest e-commerce marketplaces in the world. Wish’s mission is to make affordable goods accessible to everyone everywhere. And they have certainly accomplished it.
We had the privilege of talking to Maral Behnam-Garcia, Director of Brand Protection & Intellectual Property at Wish. She had a lot of insights into the industry that any IP thought leader would want to know about.
You can listen to the full conversation on our Heroes of Brand Protection podcast or continue reading for a sneak peek into her journey.
The following is part of the transcript of Heroes of Brand Protection podcast, featuring a conversation between M. Benham-Garcia, and Daniel Shapiro, Red Points’ VP of Brand Relationships.
Q stands for questions from Daniel Shapiro.
Wish is one of the largest and fastest growing global e-commerce platforms. They really provide an innovative shopping experience to millions of users from around the world. One of the things we do is we connect consumers to about a half a million merchants. We are located in San Francisco and we have a few offices around the world: in China, Toronto, and Amsterdam.
Being in Brand Protection there’s a lot of difficult situations that we embark on. In general, and especially coming from a marketplace, we have a lot of challenges and that’s just with the sheer volume of counterfeits and IP problems. They exist not only on our platform but in the marketplace overall. That’s one of the reasons why brand protection has taken off and it’s become such a large industry problem
One of the main challenges I see is that within the industry we tend to focus on hitting platforms. Hitting it by removing counterfeits from marketplaces and not making them purchasable. Whereas if we combat it from the source and we try to get it from manufacturers and shut down the operations where it exists… I think we would have more success in being able to tackle the problem. Otherwise, we’re playing what the industry calls ‘whack-a-mole’. As soon as we take something down or as soon as we are able to target those problematic listings, another one appears.
If I were to give any advice to anyone it would be to not close doors to opportunities that may appear. It’s important to be open minded and not to be so set in your career trajectory. You need to just be flexible and if something were to cross your path I think it’s important to explore it.
I did that and now I’m here. I’m loving it and I actually love the world of brand protection.
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