Impact Story: How Our Design FTO Search Helped A Leading Fashion Accessories Company Evaluate Infringement Risk

A Design FTO search is known to help businesses make informed decisions. A comprehensive freedom to operate search is crucial in identifying potential roadblocks at the time of seeking a patent and/or at the time of product launches.

Recently, a leading fashion accessories maker wanted to acquire few e-commerce product sellers and promptly reached out to Sagacious IP for evaluating their products for infringement risk. The following article discusses how Sagacious IP helped the client by evaluating thousands of design patents related to the fashion accessories. Once the identical, nearly identical design patents were identified, Sagacious prepared a detailed report indicating likelihood of infringement for each product.

The findings provided by Sagacious assisted the company to take informed decisions and carry out negotiations.

Client Overview And The Project

We were approached by one of the global leaders in the fashion accessory space, who wanted to acquire few e-Commerce product sellers in his domain. The client also wanted to check whether there were some active design patents that could pose an infringement threat to these products when they are launched.

The Solution : Design FTO Search

In order to tackle the issue with a strategic solution, Sagacious IP did the following:

  • Understood the key design elements of the associated products
  • Identified relevant National Classification
  • Identified relevant Locarno Classification
  • Multiple search strategies were conducted to capture the pool of design patents.
  • Analysis of the design patents was done to identify identical, nearly-identical and related documents.
  • Final report creation was done that included all essential information such as bibliographic data, legal status, etc.
  • A dedicated section was added to provide the overview of infringement risk for each product.
  • Country wise segregation of the findings was added to assess the infringement risk in each country of interest.

It is to be noted here that a total of 15 product groups were under the scope of this search.

Service Offered: Design FTO Search Study

The set of patents identified by the search was first reviewed then analyzed manually. The report was then tailored with insights and key facts. The whole exercise took a total duration of 250 hours.

How Sagacious IP shaped the outcome

The client was pleased with the project report and the insights provided in the search reports since it helped them to conduct the due diligence process effectively. Some of the products were infringing the design patents identified by Sagacious IP which gave an upper hand to the client in the negotiation process. As a result, they approached us for additional projects and thus Sagacious IP eventually became the go-to partner for future requirements. Download our design FTO sample search report to get insights into our FTO analysis here.

-Tushar Chaudhary, Nitin Sharma (Engineering) and the Editorial Team

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