Your Problem: Selling your wares sight-unseen in a foreign land with limited rule of law through unaffiliated intermediaries.
His Problem: Buying your wares of uncertain durability during an annual fair from some wandering merchant.
Your Solution: Belong to guild that enforces medieval ISO Standards, work rules, creates distinctive products requiring unique raw materials and capital goods.
In Brand Names Before the Industrial Revolution ($5), Gary Richardson argues that the "conspicuous characteristics" of durable goods produced by the end of the Middle Ages in Europe were used by their manufacturers as they would use brand-names today.
He starts with adverse selection (suppliers knowing more than consumers about the true quality of the goods), and moves to counterfeiting (highly prevalent in the middle ages and today -- tons of people in developing nations actually buy knock-off durables and pirated data instead of the "real" thing).
Enter Guilds, which were local manufacturing associations that controlled quality, and required unique production techniques that created distinctive, standardized, readily discernible outputs for consumers.
The heart of the analysis is sown from wonderfully diverse sources: