💻 MailerLite Hacked, Crypto Accounts Targeted - $3.3m Lost

📰 Industry News

• Tech layoffs have already been rife in 2024, with over 29,000 redundancies announced in January alone. (Layoffs.fyi)

• Puma posted a full-year profit increase of 6.6% (£7.36bn) showing a strong demand for sportswear, but has warned of challenges ahead in 2024. (Retail Week)

• Amazon and Roomba maker iRobot’s merger has been called off due to competition concerns. The EU and US were worried about iRobot gaining an unfair advantage, but the UK gave the bid the green light. (Sky)

• The National Retail Federation (NRF) says Valentine's Day spending will reach $25.8 billion in 2024, with 40% of consumers shopping online. (Digital Commerce 360)

• On the 15th of March 2024, Temu will open its online marketplace to US and European sellers, offering faster delivery times to Western markets. (Fashion United)

• eBay to lay off thousands of staff amidst rising costs. The layoffs are estimated to amount to 10% of their workforce. (The Guardian)

• PayPal have just announced that they are laying off 2,500 staff, as competitors seize market share. (Bloomberg)

💳 Shopify Editions Winter ‘24 Update is Here

Shopify has just released its latest version update called Shopify’s Winter Editions '24. As expected, AI plays a crucial role in the latest updates. Here are some key highlights from the 100+ new features introduced:

• Product Enhancements: Improvements have been made to how products are listed and found. This includes a revamped product model, allowing advanced features for products with different colours and styles, a better way to categorise products, and the ability to have up to 2,000 different versions of a product.

• Enhanced Search & Discovery: Enhanced AI-powered search capabilities to better understand customer intent, allows for storefront searches which go beyond keyword matching.

• Subscription & Bundle Offerings: The Shopify Subscriptions app is now fully rolled out, allowing for greater customer lifetime value through product subscriptions. Additionally, the maximum number of products in a bundle has been increased to 30.

• One-Page Checkout: Despite early criticism when introduced last year, Shopify claims their new streamlined one-page checkout reduces buyer completion time by 4 seconds while accelerating loading speeds by 95%.

• Checkout Apps: Customise your checkout experience with 90+ new apps added to the Shopify app store.

• TikTok Shop: Full integration of TikTok Shop is now available to all. It lets merchants bring products from their Shopify store and handle TikTok orders through the Shopify dashboard.

• Product Recommendation Quiz: Allows customers to take product recommendation quizzes to show them recommended products to fit their needs.

• AI Product Photography: Allows merchants to create professional product photos enhanced by AI in just a few clicks.

• Shopify Sidekick: Allows merchants to have their very own personal AI shop advisor, on hand to provide tailored and skilled advice to grow their store.

You can read through all 100+ updates on the Shopify Editions Winter ‘24 page.

With all these new features being released, e-commerce store owners have never had more tools at their disposal. If you’re looking to start your store, you can get a Shopify free trial as well as enjoy your first month for just £1.

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👩🏽‍⚖️ IP Wars: When Big Brands Take on Small Businesses

Big brands are known for vigorously defending their intellectual property (IP), and rightly so. But some companies are known for being particularly fierce in their approach.

This often leads to situations where small, independent businesses find themselves up against the financial might, and legal power of corporate giants.

A notable example, as reported by the BBC, saw L V Bespoke, a gardening supply business in the UK being sued by the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton over its use of the letters ‘L‘ and ‘V‘ in their name.

The husband and wife couple who ran L V Bespoke initially thought it was a funny prank from a friend, but they soon found themselves in a full-on legal battle.

After months of stress, sleepless nights and $15,000 spent on legal fees, the couple found themselves at the IPO tribunal where the judge ruled in their favour, highlighting that there was no comparison to be drawn from L V Bespoke and Louis Vuitton, which were operating in very different industries.

The Intellectual Properties Office in the UK receives more than 150,000 registration requests annually.

This certainly isn’t an isolated incident, so we’ve compiled some more David versus Goliath stories, and this is what we found:

• Louis Vuitton (again) Vs Louis Vuitton Dak: That wasn’t the first case for the luxury brand. Louis Vuitton sued ‘Louis Vuitton Dak‘, a South Korean fried chicken restaurant. The court ruled in favour of Louis Vuitton, recognising the similarity between the names.

• Singhsbury’s: Jel Singh Nagra had a shop called Singhsbury's that was branded much the same as UK grocery shop Sainsbury's. Supermarket giant Sainsbury's threatened to sue him. Instead of fighting, Mr Singh rebranded to name his shop Morrisingh's, branded in a similar way to another UK supermarket, Morrison's. The shop still has that name today.

• Crocs: The rubber clogs maker faced countless copycats since their launch in 2002. The delay in securing their design rights led to them losing several high-profile cases in both Europe and Australia.

• Burger King: Burger King planned to expand to Australia, but to their surprise faced an IP challenge from a small Australian take-away based in Adelaide who had already trademarked the name ‘Burger King’. The fast food giant had to rebrand their Australian operations to ‘Hungry Jacks’.

There’s no doubt that the nature of IP cases is often complex, ranging from the contentious to the bizarre. With the growing accessibility to generative AI, these intellectual property claims will only become more frequent, and crucially, more complex.

💻 MailerLite Hack Results in $3.3M Crypto Heist

MailerLite, a popular email marketing platform used by brands and newsletter creators, confirmed a significant data breach, leading to a reported $3.3 million lost in crypto phishing attacks.

The breach occurred when the hackers compromised a staff account by tricking a support manager using social engineering, allowing them to gain access to the admin panel.

• The hackers targeted 117 accounts within the platform.

• As a result, customer email addresses were compromised leading to a wave of phishing emails and fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions.

• This led to over $3.3 million from subscribers being syphoned off through the attack over an 8-hour window.

MailerLite released an incident statement, sharing that they will learn from this experience while heightening their security systems to prevent this from happening again.