The counterfeit industry has become so skilled at replicating logos, stitching, hardware and even holograms that The Wall Street Journal has reported on ‘superfakes’ good enough to fool the experts. Now a start-up founded by a former Tesla product manager Luci Holland thinks it has an answer, and it is smaller than your fingernail.
Veritas makes a chip that is embedded inside a product – a handbag, a trainer, a jacket – so that a brand can prove the item is real and an owner can prove it is theirs. The has company unveiled a second-generation chip that works on metal and can be scanned through glass, which opens the door to jewellery, watches, trophies and, yes, perfume bottles.
“The next-generation chip is ready for production and supports a broader range of applications, including jewelry, trophies, hard-surface products, and glass objects such as fragrance bottles,” Holland told TechCrunch. “Alongside our garment integrations, this gives brands more ways to incorporate authentication directly into their products.”
Why we care: if your Le Labo, your Cartier and your Vinted finds can all be authenticated with a tap of your phone, the dupe economy is about to get a lot harder to game.
What Veritas Actually Does
The pitch is simple. Brands insert a tiny Veritas chip into a product during manufacture, without damaging it. Shoppers tap their phone against the item and the Veritas app brings up a certificate of ownership plus the object’s history.
Founder Luci Holland, who has a background in design and art, argues that most existing authentication tools are too easy to beat. A QR code can be photocopied. A static NFC tag can be cloned. A digital record is only as trustworthy as the link between it and the physical thing.
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With Veritas every tap produces a fresh, encrypted answer rather than a fixed code, and if someone tries to dig the chip out and move it into a fake, the tamper wire breaks and the whole thing stops validating.
From Handbags To Perfume Bottles
Until now, Veritas has mostly lived in garments and accessories. The new chip, is built for hard surfaces and glass – the two materials that have historically made embedded authentication tricky.
Fragrance is an interesting target. Perfume is one of the most faked categories in beauty, partly because a convincing bottle and box are easy to produce and the liquid inside is hard for a shopper to judge until it is on their wrist. A chip inside the glass that answers only to the brand’s own system would settle the argument before you spray.
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Jewellery makes similar sense. Fine jewellery resale is booming, and so is the market for pieces that look suspiciously like fine jewellery. A chip that can be scanned through a metal setting gives a second-hand buyer something more reassuring than a photographed receipt.
Crowns, Trainers And Alexis Ohanian
The first big showcase for the new chip is sport rather than fashion. Veritas has announced a partnership with Athlos, the women’s track-and-field competition founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Instead a conventional trophy, each winning athlete is awarded a Tiffany & Co sterling silver crown during the event’s celebrations.
The partnership will, “create a digital record for each of its Tiffany & Co. championship crowns… Each crown will carry Veritas technology that can be accessed using a smartphone. The digital experience will authenticate the crown and allow users to discover more about its craftsmanship, Athlos, the athlete and race associated with it.”
Ohanian, who married Serena Williams in 2017, is also an investor in Veritas through his venture firm Seven Seven Six, which led the company’s $1.75 million pre-seed round in February. Veritas has also embedded a chip in a pair of LeBron James’ first Nike shoes, reimagined by the artist Adam Port. Tap your phone to the trainer and it tells you its history and story, which is the sort of thing collectors will happily pay for.
The Catch
For the system to work for shoppers, the brands they actually buy need to adopt the Veritas chip, and luxury houses have historically preferred their own in-house authentication to a third-party start-up’s.
There is also the question of what happens to everything made before the chip existed. A Veritas-enabled bottle of perfume launched in 2027 will not help you work out whether the vintage Chanel No. 5 on eBay is real. And the resale platforms, which arguably have the most to gain, will need to build the app’s checks into their own listings for the benefit to reach buyers.
Still, the direction of travel is clear and it says something about how seriously counterfeiting is now being taken, and how tech can provide the solution.
For a round-up of the other companies rethinking how fashion gets made, sold and resold, read our list of 50 European fashion tech start-ups to have on your radar.
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