YPIE Blog – week one, day one – Anti Copying In Design and Purves & Purves

This week marks the beginning of the 2018 Young Professional Industry Experience programme.

Now in its fifth year, the Young Professional Industry Experience is our unique three week intensive programme where a group of young people are given the opportunity to visit  20 industry leading companies and understand all areas of the furniture industry, including materials, designing, manufacturing, pricing, marketing, sales, and customer service.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting blogs written by this year’s five participants, so you can find out more about their experience.

Josh Chadwick, graduate sales trainee at Herman Miller, is first up sharing details of the group’s day with intellectual property lobby group Anti Copying In Design (ACID) and independent furniture retailer Purves & Purves.

We arrived at Furniture Makers’ Hall in the morning and were introduced to Hayden Davies, Master of The Furniture Makers’ Company, who gave us an overview of what they do as an organisation.

Our first session was with Dids Macdonald, CEO of Anti Copying In Design, one of the UK’s leading design and intellectual property campaigning organisations.

During the workshop, we learned how you can protect your designs, intellectual properties and intangible assets through trademarks, patents, design right and copyright.

We were also told what to do if we think we have been a victim of design fraud through the seeking of  legal advice and collecting relevant evidence. By looking at previous cases (i.e. Trunki and M&S), we found out what could have been done to prevent these and the results of each case.

There was an interesting point raised that some companies do not care about bad publicity generated from counterfeit products. It was more a case of any publicity is good publicity.

In the second session of the day, we heard from Andrew Purves and how he started Purves & Purves, the successes he achieved, the challenges of the recession and the struggles he had to overcome.

One of the key points that we took away from Andrew is that the first three years in business are the biggest challenge to overcome and that you should persevere to become profitable.

We felt as a group that overall it was a very informative day and that the sessions were a great starting point for the weeks to come.

The Furniture Makers would like to thank ACID legal affiliates Briffa, Boult Wade Tennant, McDaniel & Co, Stone King and Virtuoso for their support to deliver the YPIE ACID IP mini Master Class