For apparel decorators riding a viral trend, being first is often critical. But even the quickest draw in the Wild West of internet apparel sales will face challenges. As Kenneth Cashman, commissioner of fantasy football apparel site Rotowear, discovered: “There’s a sea of people doing the same thing as me, and a lot of them are much bigger.”

And if you’ve come up with a particularly clever T-shirt idea, you can be sure there will be a ton of fly-by-night companies ready and willing to post knockoffs. It’s a real problem, says Jamie Mottram, president of sports apparel shop BreakingT. “Every time we have a popular product, we’ll see knockoffs on Teespring and Amazon,” he says. “We’re not quite sure what to do about it. … Sometimes we may be the top organic search result on Google, but there are knockoff ads above us that hurt our sales.”

Amanda Brinkman, designer of the iconic “Nasty Woman” T-shirts popularized during the 2016 presidential election, has had to fight off counterfeiters as well. When her shirt design first came out, knockoffs were abundant, with copycat versions numbering in the thousands. “I have a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice that’s ready to go at any given moment,” she says.

Cashman, too, has dealt with knockoff versions of his shirts, some still bearing his company logo. “I’ve had some shirts where I think the counterfeiters sold more than I did,” he says.

Cashman has had mixed results getting knockoffs taken down. Sometimes cease-and-desist letters work; other times, he can’t even find real addresses or emails for the company in question. Considering the short shelf life of most viral designs, it’s rarely worth the effort to make a prolonged search for the culprit.

So how do you fend off copycats? Most print-on-demand platforms use AI to weed out potentially copyright-infringing material, but when there are hundreds of thousands of designs posted on a daily basis, it’s inevitable that some problematic content slips through the cracks.

BreakingT’s solution has to been to focus on building its brand and beefing up the company’s distribution channels, Mottram says. Thanks to licensing deals, many of BreakingT’s shirts are sold in stadium stores or through other media partners, which helps to offset potential losses due to missed online sales. “Knockoffs have probably hurt our business along the way,” he says, “but they haven’t prevented us from growing really quickly.”

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