Exhibit A of why Silicon Valley needs more women in the venture capital arena – at the very least during due diligence: Chinese online retailer Milanoo recently sent out a press release {via Tech Crunch} announcing a multi-million dollar investment from the Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s largest and most well established venture capital investment firms.

“Since its inception in July of 2008, Milanoo.com has grown by leaps and bounds. Milanoo.com has consecutively increased its revenue by 600% each year that the company has been in business. In three short years, Milanoo.com has grown to serve customers in over 180 countries around the world in seven of the most popular languages – including English, Spanish and French.” – Milanoo press release

The problem? A sizable portion of the merchandise on Milanoo is comprised of designer replica items and out and out knockoffs of everything from Christian Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik shoes to Cate Blanchett’s lavender Givenchy Golden Globes dress and Kate Middleton’s blue Issa engagement dress. We’re not talking “inspired by” designs, of the sort that ASOS built it’s very successful e-commerce business on either; among the domestic Chinese mass market brands are enough designer replicas to fill two or three Canal Street stores.

Christian Louboutin’s legal tenacity for the right to use a red sole on shoes is well documented on designs that are distinctively different from his own, and the company released a video of thousands of Chinese replicas being crushed under the tires of a bulldozer. Though they aren’t called Louboutin replicas by name, the red sole  is difficult to miss, as is the Christian Louboutin logo left in on the product images lifted from other websites (who presumably sell the real thing).

That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the dresses, which are often portrayed through a single image of celebrities on the red carpet wearing the originals that have likely inspired the Milanoo replica version. If the imitation weren’t… flattering enough, many of the images feature the Milanoo watermark on the photos to give the impression that the celebrities are wearing Milanoo.

Original Chinese fashion design talent is not an oxymoron, but China’s efforts to establish homegrown brands that can compete internationally will continue to be a struggle when the segment of the fashion sector that receives “multiple millions” in financial backing is at the risk of having their best selling products wiped out on the wrong side of a bulldozer.

While they do not specify exact figures, one of the more interesting aspects of the press release is the year over year growth and global footprint that Milanoo’s growth suggests is possible for the counterfeit apparel industry. We’ve previously noted that the online promotions counterfeiters employ often trump the original brands’ efforts, but for all of their savvy it’s still normally something of an organic process; the replica sellers don’t have the budgets for agencies and professional promotion. More concerning for the brands behind the original designs, the institutional funding attached to this investment would also seem to indicate that may be changing, and this shadowy segment of the fashion industry is gaining legitimacy faster than anyone may have known.

Sea of (fake) shoes

There’s only one problem: none of it is likely to make a significant difference. StopFakeLouboutin.com details legal actions the label has launched against counterfeiters, from raiding Chinese factories, to seizing inventory from online resellers before they could sell the fakes on auction sites.

But the biggest problem is Louboutin’s own site. Outside of gaming and fashion, most commercial brands have abandoned the all-Flash website in favor of more accessible technology that makes the content available to a wider audience, including search engines and mobile browsers. With Apple’s decision to not support Flash on the iPhone or iPad, one might hope that even online and fashion would move towards the best practice of using flash only for certain elements (like video).

Unfortunately, many labels remain stuck in the year 2000, and assault visitors with music and video that plays unprompted, enormous Flash sites that take minutes to download even on broadband (forget about a mobile connection), and no clear way for visitors or search spiders to navigate the sites outside of flashing images that force you to chase them around the screen to find out what they’re about. According to Google’s Search Keyword Tool, 12,000 mobile users search for “Christian Louboutin” each month. While that may not seem like a huge amount of people compared to the 1.8 million web users who search for the brand, that’s still 12,000 people who wouldn’t be able to find retailer information or addresses, style information or anything else on the official Louboutin website, because it’s not designed in a way that would allow mobile visitors to see anything. Search spiders? They’re seeing the same nothingness.

Is it any wonder visitors abandon official sites in favor of counterfeiters who offer a wide array of shoes, ready to purchase with a click of the mouse?

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is. We looked at similar issues plaguing Louis Vuitton’s search results, but it appears Louboutin is following a similar, expensive path which will end with no better results. You see, in addition to the video of fake Louboutins being run over by a bulldozer, the site lists recent legal victories. While shutting down the warehouses that manufacture the fake shoes is a smart move, listing websites selling fakes is probably not the best idea.

In what has to be a bit of unintended irony, the simple HTML references to the sites mean that there’s a better chance of Google and other search engines indexing the content of those sites before they “see” anything on Louboutin’s official site.

Louboutin is obviously in the shoe business, not the internet business, so we don’t hold it against him that there’s been a bit of a learning curve. We wish the company the best in protecting their brand against counterfeiters, but if they spent half the amount dedicated to legal costs to building a modern, accessible site the battle might take a fraction of the effort to win.

Otherwise, it turns into an endless game of whack-a-mole (with much prettier moles, of course) where one fake site goes down, and another pops up weeks later.