A Cold Trading Winter for Wedding Dresses in China

Less than a month away from the traditional Chinese Spring Festival, the wedding dress industry association (ABPIA) brought an accusation against a lot of China wedding dress trade companies and didn't let them enjoy the Chinese New Year. The concerned independent websites that are the subjects of the prosecution are counting more than three thousand and the amount of frozen PayPal accounts was  about eighty million by conservative estimates. Therefore the whole wedding dress industry of foreign trade entered into the winter. Compared to the prosecution which involved over one thousand companies in 2014, this incident is clearly more conspicuous. I might happen that in the next month, there might be a lot of relevant trade companies falling into this unprecedented predicament. On the other hand, the companies which survived this shock may have a good performance in 2016.

Who is ABPIA? American wedding dress industry association is organized spontaneously by some senior members of the local companies in the United States in wedding dress industry, cracking down online selling of fake wedding dresses through copyright protection. As we all know, the era of the Internet closed the distance among the global businesses. Chinese dress products with lower price soon attracted a large number of overseas customers. And cross-border trade in wedding dresses became a trend. More and more online shops have seriously impacted the native American entity shop. So ABPIA was established. Although  verbally announced to safeguard the rights and interests of consumers, in fact, what they might be maintaining is their own interests.

The prosecuted subjects that are involved are more than three thousand website domain names, and the affected businesses are at least hundreds of it. Most of them from Suzhou (China's largest wedding dress market Huqiu is located here and each year a large number of domestic and foreign wholesalers come here for goods). The reason of being prosecuted is misappropriating a large number of pictures of wedding dress brand products and violating the rights and interests of the designers and the related companies. Although this kind of behaviour has existed for many years and is the public secret of whole wedding dress trade company, the hit arrange is very wide and the influence is far more than several cases before. It can be a wake-up call for the whole wedding dress foreign trade industry.

The  prosecuted subject can appeal within 21 days. As the defendant, if they don't respond within 21 days, the relevant website domain name will be retrieved and the cash in the Paypal account will be confiscated. But it's not as easy as we imagined to provide effective information and prove their innocence. After all, embezzling images and trademarks is a fact. So far only a handful of businessmen have taken back the frozen funds and website through legal means, such as JJshouse, Tidebuy and Jusere Wedding & Evening Dress Co., Ltd . Most of these companies have their own products and designers, so their prosecution is just collateral damage.

Although some companies have reached a settlement with ABPIA and the websites have been turned back to normal, most companies may not have such good luck and strength. After all, they only broke the law in the United States. This incident will probably make China's trade companies alert and make them pay more attention to product copyright. The affected sites are independent domain names, but it is not safe to say that the platform merchants can sleep safely. It's difficult to say  if the platform will conduct such a corresponding attack scheme.