Every anti-counterfeiting label on the market today shares one weakness: it's a fixed pattern. A hologram, a printed QR code, a security thread — all of them can be photographed, scanned, and reproduced by anyone with the right printer, because the mark itself carries no information beyond its own appearance. Verification has to happen somewhere else: against a live central record, checked at the moment someone scans, not against a static pattern that looks right on sight. That distinction is the whole argument for item-level authentication, and it changes what a brand can actually do about counterfeit and grey-market stock.
A static code proves nothing by itself
A conventional QR code or hologram is a one-way message: scan it, and it resolves to the same page or shows the same image every time, for every unit, forever. That's exactly what makes it copyable. A counterfeiter doesn't need to break any cryptography — they photograph a genuine label, run off a few thousand copies, and every fake now carries a "verified" mark that looks identical to the real one. The same problem applies to a QR code that simply links to a static product page: once the URL is public, it can be printed on anything.
Item-level verification works differently. Each unit gets its own unique identifier — typically a serialised GS1 Digital Link, the ISO/IEC 18975 web-standard for encoding product identity into a QR code — and that identifier is checked against a central register at the moment of the scan, not just decoded and displayed. The register can tell the difference between a serial number that has been scanned once, a hundred times, or a thousand times in a single afternoon from ten different countries, none of which a printed hologram can ever do. That live check is what turns a QR code from a picture into a genuine authentication event.
What this actually protects: price, not just the sale
The direct cost of a counterfeit sale is the smallest part of the problem. Counterfeiting is a large and fairly stable share of world trade: the OECD and the EU Intellectual Property Office estimate, in their most recent joint mapping of the trade, that counterfeit and pirated goods imported into the EU were worth around USD 117 billion in the most recent year studied, roughly 4.7% of total EU imports. What that scale of counterfeit and grey-market supply actually erodes is the price a genuine brand can charge, because once customers can't be sure whether a listing is real, they discount their willingness to pay across the board — including for the authentic item sitting next to the fake one on the same marketplace. A retailer that can no longer vouch for what's on its own shelf loses trust with the customer just as fast as the brand does. Verification that customers and retailers can both run themselves, in seconds, at the point of purchase, is what protects list price and retailer trust at the same time — something a printed anti-counterfeit label was never designed to do, because it can't tell anyone anything beyond "this looks like the real pattern." We covered the resale side of this same argument in our piece on the commercial case for a digital product passport in fashion: a verifiable item is also a resellable one, and the two protections come from the same underlying identifier.
Diversion shows up in the data, not on the label
Grey-market diversion — genuine stock sold outside its intended market or channel — is a different problem from counterfeiting, but it hides behind the same blind spot: a brand that can't see where its product actually ends up can't tell a diverted unit from a stolen one from a straightforward retail sale. Item-level scanning changes that, because every scan carries a location and a timestamp. A batch of units authorised for one region that starts generating verification scans somewhere else entirely is visible in the data as soon as it happens, rather than surfacing months later as a pricing complaint from a distributor. That visibility doesn't stop diversion on its own, but it gives a brand something to act on — a specific batch, a specific channel, a specific point where stock left the intended path — instead of a general suspicion that something's wrong with margin in one territory.
A pilot that doesn't require re-tooling the line
The realistic way to test this is on a single SKU, not a full catalogue. A high-value or high-counterfeit-risk product line gets a unique, serialised GS1 Digital Link QR code or NFC tag applied at the point where a code or label would normally already go — no change to tooling, packaging design, or production sequencing. Each unit resolves to its own record on scan, giving the brand or retailer a genuine/verified result plus whatever supporting content makes sense: proof of authenticity, warranty registration, or a link back to the retailer of record. If the pilot uses NFC inlays rather than printed codes, the inlay manufacturer's own Declaration of Conformity is the document to check for the relevant materials and safety standards — a reseller of the inlay isn't the party certifying conformity, the manufacturer is, and that paperwork should sit alongside the pilot's other supplier documentation from day one.
Once a single SKU is running, the same register extends to further lines without rebuilding anything: the identifier scheme, the scan-time verification logic, and the analytics dashboard are shared infrastructure, not a one-off project. SmartLinks is free until you go live, so the cost of testing this on one product line, before deciding whether to extend it further, is effectively the time it takes to apply the code and check the first scan.
Start with the SKU that's already causing you the most grief — the one turning up on marketplaces at prices that don't make sense, or the one a retailer has already asked you about — and give it a unique, checkable identity before you plan the rest of the rollout.
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Sources: OECD/EUIPO, “Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025”, 7 May 2025 — https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/mapping-global-trade-in-fakes-2025_74c81154-en.html