Why you should avoid poor imitations

Emma Wells, founder and director at Jackloc talks to Glass Times about the importance of using genuine products in times of instability and uncertainty.

This year will present unprecedented challenges with both political and economic instability. This is compounded when you look at our industry, which has become incredibly competitive as firms look to win new business while trying to remedy low consumer confidence and prepare for the effects of Brexit the best they can. In short, 2018 will be tough.

Therefore, it is important that businesses ensure they are supplying quality components and hardware that have been tried and tested, rather than cheap and inferior imitations. This is especially so with window restrictors – a product where performance and quality are key to ensuring safety, and protecting against potential injuries and fatal accidents.

It is a problem we face regularly at Jackloc. With the global success of our window and door restrictor range, suppliers use the Jackloc name in the same way you would iPod, Hoover or Tarmac, to knowingly or unknowingly pass off imitations as genuine Jackloc restrictors. With not just the safety of customers, end-users and homeowners in the balance, but also livelihoods and reputations, it’s simply not worth risking it all on a possibility limited or ineffective replica.

Jackloc is well and truly a global brand; we export our restrictors to North America, the Middle East and across Europe safeguarding thousands of lives every day. We even export to the likes of Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Australia. We do everything we can to uphold and protect the Jackloc brand in these territories and at home too, but with the scale of our operation and the number of copycat products out there, it is a challenging endeavour.

One prime example of this was a hard-fought legal battle we had with a company in Turkey, which took one of our restrictors and created a blatant copy. They applied for a Turkish utility model – similar to a patent – which was initially successful and stopped us from selling our products in the country.

To protect our range, and ensure businesses were not being sold what they believed to be genuine Jackloc products, we entered into a three-year long legal battle to cancel the application. This, among other things, involved sending samples, filing evidence, attending hearings and facing the frustration of multiple postponements until the court appointed a team of experts to cast their judgement.

They of course, found in favour of Jackloc, deemed the Turkish product a copy, and removed the patent application, so we were free to sell our range in Turkey again. It was a stressful, complicated and expensive ordeal but we would not hesitate in doing that again and will fight vehemently to protect the products we invented and our customers. Our legal team is always on the look out for copycat products breaching our intellectual property and our registered trademark.

Jackloc is celebrating its 15-year anniversary this year, a milestone achieved through an overriding passion and an undivided commitment to improving window safety. We’re not here to fill a gap in the market, our mission statement has always been to dramatically reduce the risk of injuries and fatalities caused by falls from windows.

With that 15 years, we provide our customers with an irrefutable timeline of no fatalities – a claim that no other cable window restrictor can make. By supplying a copycat product, or one that has been incorrectly described as a Jackloc, you can’t be offered the same, great assurance. Any products that do not feature the Jackloc name or logo are bogus replicas.

Our commitment to safety means we have a full range of restrictors designed to suit any residential or commercial application. Designed, engineered and manufactured in the UK to exacting BS EN standards, our range includes swivel/stud, push and turn and key-lockable folding models. It is headlined by our MK2 key-lockable cable restrictor – the winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation.

Offering a collection of universal cable-based restrictors and folding models means customers can improve safety with a product renowned for setting the benchmark, whether it’s for a hotel chain, hospitals, care homes, sheltered accommodation or a home improvement project.

In uncertain times, it’s important to ensure you are using genuine products, taking advantage of a proven track record and the key USPs of a British-designed, British-made and British-sold, Queen’s Award-winning product. Not only does it strengthen your offering, it importantly safeguards your livelihood, your reputation and your customers.

www.jackloc.com