As designer accessories and sneakers merge into one large swirling storm of hype and desire—handbags and Jordans flying through the air like grail debris!—counterfeit sneakers are becoming one of the fashion industry’s biggest global threats. In December of last year, an unsealed federal complaint detailed a multi-year Department of Homeland Security investigation uncovering a massive counterfeit sneaker ring spanning New York and Los Angeles. Had those Nike and Louis Vuitton sneakers been real, they would have been worth nearly half a billion dollars.
With the resale market for sneakers only growing, how is a consumer—or a brand, or the United States government, for that matter—to combat the problem?
Entrupy, a startup founded in 2016 to authenticate luxury goods through algorithm-based technology, thinks it has the answer. On Wednesday, the company announced a new solution—an actual product—designed to identify fakes and authenticate real sneakers. The product is a box they call Legit Check Tech, which works in tandem with a constantly updated system of algorithms developed for models of popular sneakers from Jordans to Yeezys.
“We’re a team of about 30 people, mixed between being in the sneaker world, from the retail luxury world, from the data world,” co-founder and CEO Vidyuth Srinivasan said in an interview last week, at the company’s midtown WeWork. “We all come together, and we literally analyze every item, every pixel on every shoe, and then we say, ‘Okay, so this is what we have learned,’ and we apply that learning to algorithms.” Entrupy started with handbags, and began exploring sneaker authentication about a year-and-a-half ago. Handbags are a sensitive business—in fact, Entrupy is one of several businesses in which LVMH’s La Maison de Startups has invested in—but, Srinivasan said, “the need of trust and the need for verifying authenticity is the same” with sneakers.
“All of these big marketplaces and platforms where people are buying and selling—the fact that they have grown so much is in large part due to the checks that they do,” Srinivasan said. “That’s what creates that level of consumer trust. And what we have built is basically a way to augment and scale that up even more. We take human expertise, which is amazing in many cases, but it’s not repeatable and scalable. So we’ve automated that process,” he said, with algorithms. “And now we have this box.”
This box, indeed! What is this box? A 3-foot by 3-foot wooden box, modest in design, with rounded corners—friendly!—which purports to hold the secret to identifying the real deal sneaker from its mere imitator. Srinivasan’s colleague, sneaker operations coordinator Rodel Camposagrado, put two pairs of Jordan 1 Cactus Jacks in front of me and asked me to guess the fake. It was barely possible to tell the difference between the two, but the shoddy, visible red stitching hanging out of the tongue on one pair seemed a little sus to me, as the kids say. Camposagrado took the one I thought was real, snapped a photograph of the size tag (and barcode) on the inside of the shoe, and placed the shoe in the brightly lit box, which looked like an indoor tennis court for dolls. He queued up an app on an iPod—#tbt!—and the app snapped photographs of the shoe from different angles at the tap of Camposagrado’s thumb. “It takes photos of “every part of [the sneaker] that we think is important, depending on the brand or shoe or the style,” Srinivasan said.
