Stat 1: As at March 2021, 70 percent of Puffbar vapes on the market were counterfeits.
Stat 2: By September 2021, 6 months after Puffbar started making use of the Cypheme’s Artificial Inteligence (AI) powered anti-counterfeit solution, scans of fake Puffbar vapes on the market reduced by as much as 82 percent.
This is a significant drop in a space of 6 months.
The Challenge
Puffbar had been faced with horrendous levels of counterfeiting of its vape products in almost all the corners of the United States of America (USA), and in some other parts of the globe.
Being an established leader in the vaping market space – and because the brand is an easily recognizable one, counterfeiters went to work to profit off the Puffbar brand.
Puffbar vapes have been known by consumers to be of high quality, and their exciting and diverse flavours has always been a notable selling point. Seeing an opportunity, counterfeiters moved in and began to flood the market with substandard imitations of Puffbar’s products.
Customers of Puffbar started noticing that the majority of the vapes they were getting did not last as long as they usually would, and they (the vapes) sometimes never even worked at all. Puffbar started receiving thousands of complaints per week, and this became a source of concern for the company.
Inundated by complaints from customers, the company employed the services of a scratch code based anti-counterfeit label provider to help secure their products from the fakes on the market. This new anti-counterfeit measure appeared to work for about two (2) months, but it was soon rendered obsolete – The counterfeiters were back in business, counterfeiting both the Puffbar vapes and the scratch code anti-counterfeit stickers.
Why did the counterfeiting of Puffbar vapes persist?
Despite the anti-counterfeit measure instituted by Puffbar to fight the fakes, the counterfeiting continued unabated. A post-mortem carried out by Cypheme’s R&D lists the following as reasons for this:
1. The scratch code technology type which was being used is usually complex to deploy.
2. It practically has no GPS feature to help track the location of where counterfeit products were being scanned.
3. It has low reliability – In fact, if an experiment is performed a second time on a genuine product which was rightfully declared genuine by the system the first time, it will more often than not report an opposite result, thus showing it as a fake product during the second scan.
What Cypheme did differently
Cypheme presented Puffbar with its foolproof Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered anti copy Noise Print tags.
Noise Print is Cypheme’s patented proprietary technology which makes use of advanced sets of algorithms, powered by an artificial neural network to help guard products against counterfeits. The solution was easily deployed by Puffbar as there was no need to make changes to their existing systems.
Despite the robustness of the Cypheme tech, it is simple to implement, and anyone can easily verify the authenticity of products with the camera of their smartphones.
The following characteristics have made Noise Print AI tags a success story for Puffbar so far:
The features explained in the illustration above makes it almost impossible to have fake Puffbar vapes with the Cypheme noise print tag, reason why the fake vapes on the market have dropped significantly over the last couple of months.
Recap: Since Puffbar started using Cypheme’s Noise Print, the occurrence of it’s Vape counterfeit has dropped significantly – 82% in the space of 6 months.
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