Retailer slammed by Federal Court for selling counterfeit surfwear brands

The owner of a sportswear retail chain found by the Federal Court to have been selling counterfeited goods bearing the Quiksilver and Billabong trademarks has claimed he is the unwilling victim of dubious suppliers.

The claim comes after the Federal Court ordered Paul’s Retail, directed by entrepreneur Paul Dwyer, to pay damages to a number of companies including Quiksilver and DC Shoes.

Dwyer was contacted by SmartCompany this morning but was unavailable prior to publication.

Dwyer has told The Australian that he has been the victim of dubious counterfeiters, despite saying one of his suppliers was a well-known Californian company associated with a recognised children’s charity.

“It’s unfortunate that we were dudded this one time, but if you can’t trust people related to a kids’ charity, who can you trust?” he said yesterday.

“I could take you into my store right now and show you thousands of Quiksilver and DC shirts that I can say are absolutely genuine.”

Dwyer runs Paul’s Retail, which operates 14 Paul’s Warehouse locations across the east coast, including in Tasmania. The company specialises in parallel importation of sportswear, placing a high emphasis on its cheap prices.

Dwyer’s comments come after the Federal Court found that some of a shipment of 19,000 Quiksilver and Billabong board shorts were knock-offs. It even found that the company had continued selling counterfeit goods despite giving statements that such activity had stopped.

“On February 5, 2011, a private investigator made a trap purchase of a counterfeit DC Shoes t-shirt from a Paul’s Warehouse store. This was the subject of evidence adduced by the applicants at the hearing of their summary judgment motion,” the court found last week.

“Procedures to prevent counterfeit goods entering the first respondent’s stores have not in fact prevented the sale of counterfeit goods. There was evidence that Mr Dwyer’s instructions to stores to quarantine the counterfeit products had not prevented the subsequent sale of such products.”

The case came nearly a year after the Federal Court ruled against the company saying that even though goods bearing a trademark have been manufactured overseas with the consent of the trademark holder, the unauthorised importation of those goods could result in a violation.

In that particular case, the Federal Court found that clothing bearing the “Greg Norman” trademark were imported, and that while the goods were manufactured under a license, they were only meant to be sold in the country in which they were manufactured.

“Consequently, the importation of those goods into Australia and the sale of those goods in Australia through the ‘Paul’s Warehouse’ chain of discount stores were held to infringe the rights of the second Applicant,” said law firm Davies Collison Cave, which wrote a break-down of the judgement.

Dwyer has until September 26 to appeal the Federal Court’s latest decision.