The encyclopedia · Sales & Retail · Operational decision · 2025
A Ningbo clothing shop livestreamed counterfeit brand-name apparel — 1,016 pieces seized
Sunli Clothing sold unlicensed branded apparel through livestream shopping until Ningbo's regulator seized 1,016 pieces and fined the shop ¥107,000.
Sunli Clothing
What happened
Sunli Clothing (孙丽服装店), a shop in Ningbo's Haishu district, sold apparel through livestream shopping carrying brand trademarks it had no license to use — a straightforward counterfeit run into a channel where a low-resolution phone camera and a fast-moving broadcast made the fakes harder for a buyer to inspect than they would have been on a rack.
Livestream selling had already made itself the fastest-growing channel for counterfeit brand-name goods in China precisely because of that gap: a viewer decides in seconds, on video, with no chance to check stitching or a hologram tag the way an in-person shopper could. Regulators had been building enforcement capacity to match, and apparel counterfeiting in a livestream room was one of the categories they were actively watching for going into 2025.
Ningbo's Haishu district market regulator raided the operation, confiscated 1,016 pieces of infringing clothing and fined Sunli Clothing ¥107,000 in April 2025 — one of five livestream-commerce cases the national market regulator circulated that spring as examples of the enforcement now underway.
Why it happened
- A livestream sells the same counterfeit goods a market stall does, but the format removes the one defense a buyer had — the chance to physically inspect the item before paying.
- Trademark infringement doesn't need a new legal theory to reach livestream commerce; it needed regulators to point their existing tools at a new channel, which is exactly what happened here.
The lesson
Moving a counterfeit operation onto a livestream doesn't put it out of a regulator's reach — it just moves the evidence onto video.
Sources
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