Don Ed Hardy, the famed tattoo artist, must smell good. Make that really good. Ed Hardy-themed perfumes have become some of the most popular fragrances in the world with retailers buying $85 million worth of them so far this year.
Mr. Hardy’s colorful and exotic tattoo designs-cum-artwork seem to help sell just about anything. Cruise around the local mall or online and you will find Ed Hardy sweaters, jeans, shower curtains, golf carts, nasal strips and lollipops.
Thirty-five years after Mr. Hardy opened Affliction his first San Francisco tattoo studio, to only a trickle of foot traffic, his North Beach shop Tattoo City is known the world over as the place to go for vivid murals on flesh.
Were Sailor Jerry, his gruff mentor, still around, he might be bewildered and a bit aghast to find that licensees of the Ed Hardy moniker expect to move more than $700 million in merchandise this year. Tattoos have gone mainstream and then some, thanks in part to Ed Hardy.
But now a business inspired by San Francisco’s nautical past is being hijacked by its digital present. And Google, the search giant located 40 miles away on the Peninsula, inadvertently enables the piracy.
Backers of the Ed Hardy name find themselves in a constant battle with counterfeiters who quickly and easily create fake Ed Hardy Web sites, almost indistinguishable from the real sites, and then try to manipulate Google’s search and advertising systems. The end goal is to make sure people hunting for Ed Hardy gear online find the fake goods first, lining the pockets of pirates, largely based in China.
That Mr. Hardy ever ended up at the center of a global brand and counterfeiting maelstrom is rather remarkable. “In the early days in the city, I might do one tattoo and then wait three days to do another,” Mr. Hardy said in a recent interview. “I think it’s funny and totally surreal to see what’s happened.”
Neil Cole, the chief executive of Iconix Brand Group, which just bought a stake in the Ed Hardy franchise and keeps track of its worldwide sales, said: “It’s a phenomenon that has happened over the past few years. We’re looking at this booming business that is now starting to hit Asia and Europe.”
Growing up in the Newport Beach community of Corona del Mar, about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, Mr. Hardy fell in love with tattoos during a time in which they were anything but broadly accepted by mainstream society.
In the 1960s, a large city might have just one tattoo artist, who usually operated out of a non-descript shop. “In those days, everything was very secret,” Mr. Hardy said. “It was a cash business, and tattooers were classed as the lowest form of humanity, so you kept to yourself.”
The tattoo artists were visited most often by an assortment of sailors, military personnel — always appreciated because they showered regularly and were polite — and bikers who picked from limited, preset pictures.
Mr. Hardy, along with a few others in the field, hit on the idea that people ought to have more options and a chance to pick from customized, sweeping designs. He would talk with a client and then set to work, crafting what amounted to body murals rather than the stereotypical anchor and mom pictures.
Over the years, Mr. Hardy built a reputation as one of the most creative tattoo designers, intermixing Asian, Californian and American themes throughout eye-popping pictures.
“I just wanted to develop it as a challenging medium,” Mr. Hardy said. “It was just stupid that everything had to have black outlines.”
About five years ago, the French fashion designer Christian Audigier decided to create an Ed Hardy line of clothing, wrapping the tattoo designs around the arms of sweaters and down the legs of jeans so that people could put their counter-culture statements in the closet at night rather than making lifelong commitments.
Today, celebrities from Madonna and Britney Spears to reality TV stars are often seen in Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier gear, and grousing celebrity and fashion Web sites have noticed. Mr. Cole said the Ed Hardy brand has entered a delicate stage where it is important to keep it “cool and fashionable” without being overexposed.
“An Ed Hardy golf cart that costs a few thousand dollars is a wonderful status symbol,” Mr. Cole said. “But, when I see an air freshener that goes for $3, it’s time to pull back the reins.”
Control, however, seems a tough thing to come by when it comes to the Ed Hardy brand. Just as some of the brands’ backers look to narrow the Ed Hardy product line, counterfeiters around the globe have taken matters into their own hands.
Dave Rosenberg, the managing director at Mr. Hardy’s licensing company Hardy Way, has authorized police raids at factories in Israel, Mexico, Australia and in the United States where fake Ed Hardy merchandise was being produced. Recently, Mr. Rosenberg stumbled upon a counterfeit Ed Hardy shop in the Mission district of San Francisco.
But the biggest threat to the brand comes from online raiders who copy the content from legitimate Ed Hardy Web sites word-for-word and picture-for-picture. People searching for “Ed Hardy Hoodies” will find a host of fake sites that offer the gear at huge discounts.
A number of cases have gone through the courts trying to create firmer rules for blocking competitors and others from buying advertising words tied to a particular brand, although the law remains opaque.
“This is a particularly difficult situation and is what lawyers politely call an unsettled area of law,” said Mark F. Radcliffe, an intellectual property lawyer at DLA Piper.
Mr. Rosenberg must keep track of ads pointing to fake sites and submit removal requests to Google on a regular basis. “Even if Google gets one, they just set up another site and ads in a matter of minutes,” he said. “The counterfeiters are so much faster than Google.”
In June, Google released what it billed as an improved trademark-abuse complaint system, giving people an online form to fill out if they think nefarious types have bought ads to promote counterfeit goods. Google now acts on complaints within days rather than months as it had in the past, Mr. Rosenberg said.
But the fake Ed Hardy sites lurking in Google’s regular search results are likely to be around for a while. Google’s search algorithms are designed to deal with the entire Web and are less flexible when it comes to blocking individual sites. And the counterfeiters have devised effective means of making themselves attractive to Google’s algorithm, experts say.
Knowing that the algorithm favors sites linked to by many other sites, the counterfeiters create both bogus sites that link back to the main counterfeit site, not to mention fake blogs with thousands of computer-generated posts and comments.
Ultimately a brand’s success may be measured by the lengths counterfeiters are willing to go to in a bid to cut in on the action. “The better the brand is the worse the problem is,” Mr. Cole said.
As for Mr. Hardy, his tattooing services are no longer available at Tattoo City. (The going rate for a real tattoo is $200 per hour for tattoos from other artists. ) He has set up a nearby studio for painting and other projects.
“I tattooed for 40 years,” he said. “That’s enough.”
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