(Photo by Cooper Neill/Getty Images for Hublot)
Once a shut-down, All-Pro strong safety for the Dallas Cowboys, Darren Woodson is going back on the defensive. In 2017, he became the founder of the software company, CounterFind which tracks and eliminates ads selling counterfeit merchandise online. The company, still in its infancy, just received an investment from the Blue Star Innovation Partners, a fund founded by Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, his family and entrepreneur Rob Wechsler.
Woodson’s foray into the tech space began with an investment in a small e-commerce apparel company. In setting up meetings with large organizations like the NFL and NFLPA, he realized a common problem: evasive online counterfeiters.
As a matter of fact, it’s roughly a $4 billion problem for brands in the sports, music and entertainment spaces.
After walking out of one meeting, Woodson thought to himself that there needs to be a way to stop the sale of counterfeit merchandise on a larger scale.
“That’s the big key,” Woodson explained. “To me, selling apparel online, that’s one thing, anybody can do that. But finding out how to be disruptive in stopping counterfeit merchandise was something I definitely wanted to be involved with.”
In starting CounterFind, Woodson brought on Rachel Duitch to help with business development and hired an overseas company to build the technology.
“These marketers know what they’re doing is illegal so they hide all of these products in the back-end of the website,” explained Duitch, CounterFind’s VP of Business Development. “The only way to be able to find the product is to be served a targeted ad on Facebook.”
As such, the technology plugs into APIs to find the sellers and shut them down at the ad-level.
CounterFind last year partnered with NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. to combat counterfeit merchandise.
Now working with high-profile sports clients like the Cowboys, Ohio State University and Collegiate Licensing Company, the investment from BSIP marks another step forward for CounterFind.
“It’s a strategic investment knowing who the Cowboys are and how big their brand is,” Woodson said. “Just the understanding of Jerry Jones and how they feel about the counterfeit merchandise industry as a whole. This is a great partnership in the fact that they understand how to protect their brand and they want to go out along with us and help push that our there.”
For Woodson and CounterFind, the goal now is to educate big brands and become the industry leader. After all, as Woodson put it bluntly, “you don’t get with Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys and dream small.”
