Counterfeiting

During the 1970s, the explosive popularity of Gucci turned the brand into a prime target of the counterfeiting industry. The Gucci workshops elaborated the brindle pigskin tanning technique that became a Gucci signature, and a tanning process difficult to counterfeit. In 1977 alone, Gucci launched 34 lawsuits for counterfeiting. By the mid-1980s, the brand was involved in « thousands of confiscations and lawsuits all over the world ».

On 5 November 2013, the UK's Intellectual Property Office issued a ruling that Gucci had lost the rights to its GG trademark in the UK "to a version of the GG logo in four categories, which encompassed garments such as bracelets, shoulder bags, scarves and coats". However, "according to Gucci, the ruling does not affect the use of its GG logo in the region" because "Gucci is the owner of several other valid registrations for this mark, including a Community Trade Mark (covering the European Union) for its iconic GG logo and those rights are directly enforceable in the U.K."

In November 2008, the website TheBagAddiction.com was shut down after being sued by Gucci for selling counterfeit products. In 2013, Gucci cracked down on 155 domain names used by counterfeiters to sell fake Gucci products. In 2015, Gucci's parent company Kering sued the Chinese website Alibaba for listing a lot of « obviously fake Gucci products » on its website. In April 2016, Gucci's anti-counterfeiting legal actions backfired when the targeted products were the papier-mâché shaped exactly like Gucci products and burned by Chinese people during the ancestral Qingming Jie tradition. In April 2017, Gucci won a lawsuit against 89 Chinese websites selling fake Gucci products. In October 2018, Marco Bizzarri warned the Chinese ecommerce giants Alibaba and JD.com that Gucci could not open shop on their websites as long as they would not remove the many fake Gucci products out of their listings. In December 2019, Gucci sued three dozen websites selling fake Gucci products.