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Executive Summary
Lee Valley Tools Ltd. has been meeting the needs of serious woodworkers and gardeners for more than 25 years as one of the world’s leading mail-order and retail suppliers of woodworking and gardening tools and high-end cabinet hardware. Working in concert with its R&D and manufacturing division, Veritas Tools Inc., Lee Valley continuously ranks as one of the most innovative hand-tool design firms in the world, producing unique, high-quality products professionals rely on daily to get the job done right.

Over the years, Lee Valley has built its quality-brand reputation by relying on three guiding principles: customer satisfaction, integrity and treating the customer like a friend. Whether a tool from Lee Valley is one made by Veritas Tools or is one of the 5000 or so it acquires from around the world, the company is focused on providing its customers with a consistently unique experience each and every time they come into contact with the Lee Valley brand.

The Lee Valley brand is not only vital to the success of the company, it is the company. Protecting it requires an investment in intellectual property due diligence in order to understand the competitive threats and strategies poised at diminishing the Lee Valley name and reputation.

Major Challenge
One major threat affecting the Lee Valley brand came directly from eBay resellers auctioning off Lee Valley products. While it is perfectly legal and normal for individuals to resell a product on eBay, it is not legal to use copyrighted material to do so. This was the scenario Agi Vezér, Intellectual Property Department Manager at Lee Valley, faced when she started encountering Lee Valley products being auctioned and sold on eBay using Lee Valley’s marketing language and images.

In addition to the obvious unauthorized use of Lee Valley’s intellectual property by eBay sellers, Agi Vezér was even more concerned about the negative perceptions the brand would likely face as a result. The first step involved contacting eBay directly to request appropriate action against the known perpetrators. The second step involved finding a solution that would allow Ms. Vezér to monitor eBay in order to identify those entities that are using Lee Valley’s copyrighted materials without permission.

Turning to Nerac, Ms. Vezér found a consistently reliable solution by collaborating with Nerac Senior Analyst Mike Mahoney. Using years of experience and a strategic research approach, Mr. Mahoney put together a systematic monitoring solution that would alert Ms. Vezér to any actual uses of Lee Valley’s copyrighted works by eBay resellers. Armed with the coordinates and relevant records of each copyright breach, Ms. Vezér can now confidently alert eBay to stop auctions from proceeding.

Mr. Mahoney’s thorough understanding of market intelligence as well as IP due diligence were ultimately the components that helped Lee Valley protect its intellectual property rights and brand reputation. “Without Nerac, we would have deploy an analyst to monitor the copyright violators using the Lee Valley brand material,” explained Ms. Vezér. “Because of Nerac’s targeted monitoring solution, we successfully contain unauthorized use of Lee Valley’s marketing content and imagery by eBay resellers and diligently defend our brand reputation.”

The Nerac Factor
Protected Copyrighted Materials:
Nerac Analyst Mike Mahoney’s analytical research provided Lee Valley with a successful monitoring solution that ultimately helps the company gain control over auctions using the Lee Valley copyrighted language and images without permission.

Brand Reputation Management:
The monitoring solution created by Mr. Mahoney provides Lee Valley with a systematic approach for tracking unauthorized uses of the Lee Valley brand name across eBay auctions, thus ensuring the Lee Valley customer perception remains intact and globally protected.

Significant Savings in Time and Effort:
Because Nerac is providing ongoing, critical information which assists in diligent brand and copyright monitoring and policing, Lee Valley doesn’t need to perform the research themselves, allowing Lee Valley to do what they do best: produce unique, high-quality products their customers world-wide rely on daily to get the job done right.