As the second-hand and vintage market grows, so does the demand for counterfeit experts. Few schools offer specialised training, so for those who want to become experts, Vestiaire Académie, launched by the second-hand platform Vestiaire Collective, seems like a nugget.
The history of Vestiaire Académie
Vestiaire Académie was structured in 2017 but has been around since the platform was born in 2009. Victoire Boyer-Chammard, head of the French company’s authentication department, has been instrumental in making this professional training a coherent educational organisation that enables all of Vestiaire Collective’s anti-counterfeiting experts to formulate the same conclusion after the expertise of a product, whether they work in Hong Kong or Tourcoing.
“Since 2009, many items have passed through our hands or been photographed. So we’ve built up a huge database,” Victoire Boyer-Chammard points out in an interview with FashionUnited. The training is based on this knowledge, carefully accumulated over the years, but not only that.
Today, part of my job is to talk to the brands to see how we can work together to make sure we have the right expertise,” continues Victoire. In practical terms, they are involved through training courses, by validating the educational documents that we have created as part of the academy, or by giving us access to their archives”.
How do you join the training programme?
More than 90 people have completed Vestiaire Collective’s internal training course. It’s a prerequisite for joining the elite team that works on the expertise of the products sold on the platform. How do you get into this unique school? The recruitment stage is quite strict,” says Victoire Boyer-Chammard. A lot of people want to become experts but don’t necessarily have the required skills. First, we assess their knowledge of fashion history, then we put them through a practical test with counterfeits and authentic items, to see how well they understand a piece, whether they have good logic, whether they have an ‘eye’, as we say in the jargon”.
The profiles are diverse, but all are tested with the same rigour.
When I started at Vestiaire, I recruited a lot of auctioneers, but even these profiles were challenged on their knowledge and their ability to provide expertise,” she continues. Whatever the background, there will always be these two recruitment stages.
The stages in this path to excellence
After the interview, the candidate joins the academy, starting with two months’ training. During this time, the new recruit will learn to look at the pieces in a certain way and to follow a specific methodology adopted by the Vestiaire Collective teams. During these two months of theory and practice, no independent appraisals are carried out, but at the end of this period, if the management team considers that the candidate has assimilated the training well, he or she will begin to appraise items at three levels.
“We’ll start by giving them pieces that are easier, and as they progress through Vestiaire, it depends on how they develop, but generally after a year and a half or two years, they move on to slightly more complicated brands, and then, after another year and a half or two, they’ll have access to jewellery pieces”, explains the head of the department.
“As soon as there are new collections, they need to know about them and we need to be able to anticipate what is going to arrive in their hands.”
Victoire Boyer-Chammard, head of the authentication department at Vestiaire Collective.
Team members are then trained throughout their careers, as the fight against counterfeiting requires constant and regular updates. As soon as there are new collections, they have to be kept up to date and we have to be able to anticipate what’s going to come into their hands,” explains Victoire. My role is to talk to the brands to get information and make sure we have the right knowledge at the right time.
Who are the candidates?
The candidates who have joined the Vestiaire Collective team come from the fashion industry, auction houses and the archives of the major fashion houses. “They all have the same passion for the product,” says Victoire. Depending on their profile, candidates can choose to specialise. “We try to adapt to their interests and desires. And we’ve also specialised some people ourselves. For example, in the jewellery category, several of them have taken training courses at the ING (Institut National de Gemmologie) to learn how to look at pieces and assess the purity of a stone, the number of carats of a diamond, etc.”