> When Deckers, the company behind fleece-lined UGG boots, recently took Quince to court over its lookalike boots, it tried to bar Quince from referencing “dupe culture” at trial.
> The bid failed, confirming that “dupes” and “dupe culture” — a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products — are cultural phenomena here to stay.
> The trial focused on whether Quince’s shearling boots that really, really look like UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had copied the UGG design — but the patent over the UGG boot should not have been issued in the first place because the design was too generic to protect. The ruling opened the door for Quince and any other brand to make a similar-looking boot, opening up a new frontier for “dupe culture.”
UGG itself is a company that operates by abusing intellectual property laws.
> a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products
This is expected IMHO, given that name brand product do nothing more than raise and raise prices, with varying list of ~excuses~ reasons such as "war here or there", "material/labor costs", "crisis", etc... But consumers' salaries are the same than before price raises of the last 7~10 years, so the new prices are unjustified (no better quality, no better products) and so people will keep expecting that a boot (or anything else) costs today the same as it cost in 2019.
Seems wild to me they would be still suing to protect that patent in 2026 (or 'recently') – cheap Primark clones seemed to be the standard footwear of (female) teens & pre-teens in the 00s. (And they absolutely called them 'UGGs'.) That ship has long since sailed.
But yeah, when Deckers bought the Ugg brand name the quality went down. Similar to Dunlop Volleys which are now crappy quality too. I don't buy either now.
Might as well get any other brands version of the same thing - the quality is unlikely to be any worse. Hell, my kid opted for fluffy crocs instead even though they are yet to truly know the word bogan...
I'm not a fashion guru. I'd argue there isn't any good Australian brand.
Maybe R.M.Williams boots if your wallet is tolerant to something way overpriced.
But they seem to be targeting the exec crowd who want dress-boots-with-aussie-country-cred while this exact marketing ploy is causing the loss of that credibility.
Again with the brand abuse. But the brand wants to exude quality, even if it is way over priced for what you get, so that's something.
To clarify, Uggs originated in Australia and are a generic term here.
Deckers owns a trademark outside Australia and is enforcing it against people in Australia.
It would be like if a US company registered Champagne as a trademark then enforced it against French companies selling it.
I see. Similar to Balsamico di Modena / generic balsamic vinegar?
Does non-PDO Parmesan exist in Italy? In the US, "Parmesan" is usually some kind of domestic hard cheese that lacks maturity. The genuine Parmigiano Reggiano costs around 3x.
Champagne is absolutely not a "generic" product in the US.
While some California wines were and still are sold as "California Champagne", there was a court decision back in 2006 which affirmed the same protected trademark for Champagne as in the rest of the world, with the caveat that wineries already using the "Champagne" name would be grandfathered in and permitted to continue doing so.
A bottle of Champagne made in the US will be labeled with its origin, and no one can start a winery and start selling Champagne in the US. That's not the same thing as "generic".
I guess it's "generic" in the sense that everyone calls a sparkling wine "champagne", same as everyone calls a copier a "Xerox machine", but if some other company would try to sell their copier using the Xerox name, they would still be sued by Xerox (the company)?
There is a kinder variant for such - prosecco, which can actually mean OK quality (within sparkling stuff bounds, which are not high).
But yeah calling anything Champagne apart from stuff coming from Champagne is a bad form and looked down upon a bit. Small kids do such mistakes and thats fine, adults shouldn't.
I don't think it's uniquely Fanatics. All kinds of "luxury" brands have been dropping their quality standards for several decades now. And not for making some mass market cheaper products, but on their regular supposedly "luxury" lines.
But as the Frankfurt School
Famously said about the Mona Lisa that the copies make the original. In other words the copies give the original all the publicity to make it famous.
They said that, but it was already quite famous for centuries. As were other paintings, not copied, and not involved in some high publicity heist like it.
Solvair now make the real Dr Martens (in the UK)! The high street brand that owns the name makes all theirs in the far East. Check out Solvair if you can find them, they are better quality.
This is like a reverse-dupe situation. The people who actually made the boots (NPS, a co-op in the UK) never owned the brand [0]. Then in 2013, the brand was acquired by a PE company [1] who did what PE companies do and got cheap, nasty, versions of the boot made in East Asia.
So the "dupe" non-branded version is actually the original, and much, much better quality than the branded official version of the product.
Seems about the only kitchen things you can trust now are cast iron, carbon steel and sheet pans, because you can’t really do much to cheapen them in terms of materials except take them offshore (and most of the brands like Lodge are proudly domestic). After spending some time in culinary I started buying stuff from restaurant stores. It’s not always pretty but it tends to be a lot more practical. Glad Cambro is on there.
I’ve also started to pick up ceramics from local makers as there are a lot of potters lurking around. Often the prices are good, certainly comparable to the luxury consumer brands like Wedgewood.
Also we’re a Makita household, not because the usual options are insufficient for home use, but they’re one of the only independent power tool makers left. Most other hand tools I try and buy vintage/restored when I’m in Europe as they’re much cheaper than in the US.
Point6 as a successor to IceBreaker I didn’t know about. There are very few good merino companies and apparently their conglomerate also owns Smartwool.
Made in Japan: Gangy 300 can opener. No moving parts, just a handle of heavy stamped steel, with a stainless claw blade riveted on. Last opener I'll ever need. $12 online from the usual suspect.
I remember buying a Nike Tshirt in the early 2000s: good quality, and still looking decent today. Nowadays most of the Nike/Adidas/etc stuff is very low quality fabric and not necessarily cheap (at least in Western Europe)
Style seems to me to be one of those things that shouldn't have IP. Oh no, what happens if it isn't protected? Society spends less money on parasitic fashion?
The centralisation is abnormal. Used to have one blacksmith in each village making clone horseshoes and earning a living. Now there's one company in South Korea that makes all the world's horseshoes and earns a million livings while each village has minus one living. And the guy who invented the horseshoe is sleeping under a bridge.
Centralization offers efficiency gains, else it won't happen. Your imaginary company in South Korea likely makes a million horseshoes employing only 1000 people, and the horseshoes are good quality, and the price is like 5% of the price of a handcrafted horseshoe. Many more people can afford horseshoes as a result.
But think of the jobs! There used to be a million people involved in horseshoe-making, now there is only a thousand, and the rest of that million now has to do something else! And since there is literally nothing else for them to do, they'll have to die out :(
The most bizarre thing about the economical systems is that there indeed were cases where former workers of the industries that collapsed/disappeared indeed went the way of the dodo.
It depends on the speed of change though. If a million-strong industry collapses overnight, it can lead to really painful social disturbances. If it winds down in 10 years, the transition can be much more smooth.
At the start of the last century the UK had a million people working in the coal mining industry. Now it is effectively zero.
That reduction happened over a long period but it wasn't without its problems. Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.
Very much so, nothing was done to even give them opportunities to get work anywhere else either. And then on top of that the Tories destroyed everything else.
This is an intentional policy choice btw. You could just legislate the horseshoe company pays 90% of each displaced blacksmith decreasing by 5% per year.
And hey, almost a million blacksmiths displaced is a huge block of voters that any elected politician would be glad to capture! Although I struggle to recall any of the examples of something like this happening in the real-world history.
I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper. And the consumers in the village prefer cheap shoes to locally made (expensive) ones.
Fundamentally consumers like cheap stuff. Manufacturing shifts happen because as soon as there's a cheaper output, you've won. Consumers will reliably switch to cheap. At the start there may be some brand loyalty, there may even be a quality difference, but both those erode quickly.
Lots of people promote the idea of buying locally, even if it's more expensive. But it's a hard message to sell, and a tough one to buy. I'm sorry for the blacksmith, but times are hard and I need my horses shod.
It's easy to blame capitalism or factory owners or foreign cheap labor or any other convenient political scapegoat. But the root of the problem is consumer preference for cheap (even if inferior) to the exclusion of everything else.
This is perhaps culturally most evident where the premise above is false. In the US for example food is low quality, but plentiful. In Europe food generally costs more, but is of a much higher standard. Portions are smaller. Quality is more important than quantity.
This is not by accident. Europe has deliberately fostered local food markets, local food production, and promoted a narrative around history and good production. Cheap food is available, but quality food has a strong foothold.
As to your general point, I don't think the blame can lie with the consumer as the consumer almost always does not have the expertise to recognize quality and understand the consequences of buying lower quality. Nor can you expect everyone to be an expert in everything. Without that expertise, buying a more expensive product is a gamble while a lower priced one is at least a known quantity even if it isn't the theoretically best deal.
But, of course, there's no law of nature saying that we have to organise our society according to "rational" market dynamics. Many writers (famously Adam Smith) have opined on the subject.
> I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
There is difference between the political power and the economical power. The economical power of the aggregate consumer is vast, but it's unconsolidated, and doesn't usually translate into the political power. The economical power of several centralized/monopolized producers is also vast, but it's consolidated and usually does translate into the political power. Plus, you know, class consciousness and all that — the gentlemen and the nobles in the Parliament may bicker and backstab each other, but the moment the peasants revolt against the Enclosure Acts, they put their differences behind them and start the hangings.
> Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper.
Yeah, but they can speed their victory up by paying the legislature (or straight up being a large part of that legislature) to crack down on those small-scale manufacturers. License the blacksmithing itself, require obtaining certificates of quality for horseshoes for sale, and tax shoe-fitting unless it's done with the authorized horseshoes — and that's only barely scratching the surface.
You should share your crystal ball that tells you the future so you can help leaders accurately predict changes in supply and demand curves so that they can make better policy choices.
The opposite is actually true in reality. More people can afford X than ever before, for nearly any X that doesn’t involve directly paying for someone else’s labor.
Depends on the overarching economical policies. During the British rule, the Indian textile weavers went out of manufacturing business and had to switch to sustenance farming, and then perish during one of the many famines. And the Parliament legally forbade the public relief efforts, such as fundraisers to buy and send corn to the affected regions, explicitly citing the concerns that such efforts would skew the market forces and unbalance the trade.
Well, the guy who invented the horseshoe died thousands of years ago.
And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the blacksmith isn’t out of a job, but I always hate that so many people think the solution to that problem is to just give up the economic benefits of specialization instead of working to improve the distribution of the gains.
I've come to view the goal of things being cheap as an anti goal. The biggest contribution to us speed running killing our ecosystems. Maybe all of us going without more often would end up with a significantly higher standard of living in the long term.
>Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
And for a village that had 50 such specialties... they can make do with 49 specialties. Then with 48. And 45 as well. 25 eventually. But some day in the future, their great-grandchildren wake up, and there are no jobs. That Korean factory even ships in tractors, so there's no farm labor work to be had for the 200 who didn't have a specialty. But the food still costs money. And it doesn't matter if the village is gone because those people moved to the city, there's not much work there either. And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?
Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).
Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.
I think this is missing the part of the story where the blacksmith in South Korea comes to open a shop in your backyard and yet you delay them for years for inane reasons.
The real dupes are people without money to burn buying the originals at 10 and 20 times the cost, due to marketing convincing them goods made with the same materials, in similar (or even the same) factories, and often using sweatshop like labor, are somehow hand-crafted objects of luxury.
And then you have Swatch, making cheaper versions of the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, as almost a licensed dupe (though since both are owned by the same parent company, it's almost more of an iPhone SE to an iPhone Pro comparison, in a way).
This kind of leaves out the biggest question imo which is that of quality.
Usually, dupe's sacrifice quality for price. The fact that a market exists for this at all indicates a strong consumer acceptance of lower quality items.
I do wonder, if the "premium" option were to never exist, would these "dupes" even exist in the first place as they seem to enjoy an "implied" quality that the premium option pays for, whilst cannibalizing sales.
>> Usually, dupe's sacrifice quality for price. The fact that a market exists for this at all indicates a strong consumer acceptance of lower quality items.
I think it is the other way around, too many brands lowered their quality enough that general consumers no longer believe (or perceive) the "premium" options to be worth it.
Might as well gamble and get the cheapest option that does not hurt the wallet too much, when high-quality is so rare these days.
"Dupe" might need to be more specific. What is copied? Is it design, brand name, quality, parts or functionality? What is not to be copied? and why?
Dupe might affect the seller, but customer doesn't care much. In the past, people had to go by brand name as an assurance of quality. We have other means now. Reviews from other buyers, detailed specifications, return policies - all reduced the moat of branding. People can now buy any brand that has specifications they want, use reviews for quality assurance and it's easy to return the product if required. Brand is not playing the same role it used to.
We have nothing of the sort. Reviews are bought and manipulated at scale. Dupe brands come and go month to month. Very few of the electronics I've bought on Amazon in the last 8 years are still for sale, but for most of them there are current listings with the same pictures and a "different" brand name.
Most reviews that aren't fake are useless and written within the first few days of ownership anyway .
Most counterfeits goods skimp on manufacturing quality. Like instead of very detailed stitching with intricate design they might just skip that altogether. For instance one of the easiest ways to identify dupes is if the brand name and design on a bag 'flows' to the other side. Obv counterfeits dont really care because they want to save money
For counterfeit goods that are so high quality 1) they would only show pictures of it, not the real thing and 2) only cost like 1/3 of the brand price.
Aka that $600 bag would still cost $200 if it had identical quality. This is all based on what business owners told me from when I visited counterfeit markets in China
For luxury brand bags that cost $2-10k you pay around $300-600 for high quality counterfeits, but they really are almost identical. Sometimes they are higher quality.
There's an ongoing lawsuit with another guitar maker who essentially is claimng something like the fender guitar body is basically independently / evolutionarily the only good body style and that there's a convergence and so it's like trying to patent the shape of a saxophone or violin
It's interesting you used both saxophone and violin as your examples, as they are very different historically.
Violins are basically ancient and evolved gradually over huge time spans, yes.
But saxophones -- invented by a guy named Adolph Sax and patented in France in 1846! It really was a kind of new thing, combining aspects of brass and woodwind instruments in ways that hadn't been done before. I think it's fair to say he invented it as a new instrument. (What legal protection that should get how is another story, I don't know that I like patents honestly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone
Sax was really mad about manufacturers reverse engineering and copying his saxophone without a license and tried suing them etc, for the period before his patent expired, but it was still being copied a lot -- it was a new thing people were excited about. Once the patent expired, it was definitely a free for all.
> Violins are basically ancient and evolved gradually over huge time spans,
Hey! I understand your point and you are completely right about violins and saxophones being completely different, but it is simply not right to use the word "ancient" with violins.
We know pretty much exactly how and when the violin evolved. If you found a viola or another instrument from the 1500s you would perhaps say that it's violin-like, but it's clearly not a violin. The Stradivarius is from the 1600s, the modern concert form is from the 1800s. Any which way it is far from being ancient.
A better example of ancient instruments is the flute and the drum. They are truly ancient, have existed in many cultures, and we do not know when they were first built.
Yeah they kind of messed up the in-world economy by making gold worthless. I’m waiting for them to release an update where they finally have a sink in place. The duping problem should resolve itself after that.
> When Deckers, the company behind fleece-lined UGG boots, recently took Quince to court over its lookalike boots, it tried to bar Quince from referencing “dupe culture” at trial.
> The bid failed, confirming that “dupes” and “dupe culture” — a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products — are cultural phenomena here to stay.
> The trial focused on whether Quince’s shearling boots that really, really look like UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had copied the UGG design — but the patent over the UGG boot should not have been issued in the first place because the design was too generic to protect. The ruling opened the door for Quince and any other brand to make a similar-looking boot, opening up a new frontier for “dupe culture.”
UGG itself is a company that operates by abusing intellectual property laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots_trademark_dispute
> a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products
This is expected IMHO, given that name brand product do nothing more than raise and raise prices, with varying list of ~excuses~ reasons such as "war here or there", "material/labor costs", "crisis", etc... But consumers' salaries are the same than before price raises of the last 7~10 years, so the new prices are unjustified (no better quality, no better products) and so people will keep expecting that a boot (or anything else) costs today the same as it cost in 2019.
Worse, too often name brands even start lowering the quality once the brand has been established.
Seems wild to me they would be still suing to protect that patent in 2026 (or 'recently') – cheap Primark clones seemed to be the standard footwear of (female) teens & pre-teens in the 00s. (And they absolutely called them 'UGGs'.) That ship has long since sailed.
Fashion trends tend to be roughly on a 20 year cycle. Uggs are back in fashion with GenZ
https://www.elle.com/uk/fashion/what-to-wear/a69924640/how-t...
https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/how-to-style-ugg-boots
Came here to say this. Deckers UGGs are cheap Chinese knockoffs of the Australian original.
This feels like it wasn't quite worded well.
But yeah, when Deckers bought the Ugg brand name the quality went down. Similar to Dunlop Volleys which are now crappy quality too. I don't buy either now.
Might as well get any other brands version of the same thing - the quality is unlikely to be any worse. Hell, my kid opted for fluffy crocs instead even though they are yet to truly know the word bogan...
So what are the good Australian boot/shoe brands now?
I'm not a fashion guru. I'd argue there isn't any good Australian brand.
Maybe R.M.Williams boots if your wallet is tolerant to something way overpriced.
But they seem to be targeting the exec crowd who want dress-boots-with-aussie-country-cred while this exact marketing ploy is causing the loss of that credibility.
Again with the brand abuse. But the brand wants to exude quality, even if it is way over priced for what you get, so that's something.
They are not knockoffs. Ugg boots are a generic product. The Australian manufacturer does not have exclusive rights to the design either.
A generic Australian product. But however Deckers owns Ugg as a trademark everywhere but here and NZ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots_trademark_dispute
Yes. In contrast to Mozzarella, Champagne, and many others which are generic products in the USA, and protected trademarks in their region of origin.
I didn't realise the trademark holder is a US company.
To clarify, Uggs originated in Australia and are a generic term here. Deckers owns a trademark outside Australia and is enforcing it against people in Australia.
It would be like if a US company registered Champagne as a trademark then enforced it against French companies selling it.
Only mozzarella di bufala campana has PDO, even in Italy there are non-PDO, generic mozzarella cheeses produced outside the region.
I see. Similar to Balsamico di Modena / generic balsamic vinegar?
Does non-PDO Parmesan exist in Italy? In the US, "Parmesan" is usually some kind of domestic hard cheese that lacks maturity. The genuine Parmigiano Reggiano costs around 3x.
Champagne is absolutely not a "generic" product in the US.
While some California wines were and still are sold as "California Champagne", there was a court decision back in 2006 which affirmed the same protected trademark for Champagne as in the rest of the world, with the caveat that wineries already using the "Champagne" name would be grandfathered in and permitted to continue doing so.
A bottle of Champagne made in the US will be labeled with its origin, and no one can start a winery and start selling Champagne in the US. That's not the same thing as "generic".
Champagne isn't a trademark and it's *generic* in US. What happened that in 2006 US signed an agreement with EU. Obviously everything can change.
https://www.ttb.gov/system/files/images/pdfs/rulings/2008-1....
I guess it's "generic" in the sense that everyone calls a sparkling wine "champagne", same as everyone calls a copier a "Xerox machine", but if some other company would try to sell their copier using the Xerox name, they would still be sued by Xerox (the company)?
At least here in Europe, even children know that “sparkling wine” and “champagne” refer to different things.
There is a kinder variant for such - prosecco, which can actually mean OK quality (within sparkling stuff bounds, which are not high).
But yeah calling anything Champagne apart from stuff coming from Champagne is a bad form and looked down upon a bit. Small kids do such mistakes and thats fine, adults shouldn't.
Not all adults care about the origin location nor should they.
The US legal system doesn't have the concept of "trademark" in the way you're using it, that word means something else here.
And no, "trademark" definition aside, it's not "generic" in the US by any definition of "generic" commonly used in the US, legal or otherwise.
Knockoff may not be quite the right word, my point is they're a copy of inferior quality.
With decreasing quality of branded products, there's less to distinguish them from dupes.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
Sports jerseys are funny- they've gotten to the point where the dupes are cheaper AND higher quality (eg embroidered instead of cheap iron-on patches)
Incidentally I've seen some where they've taken off the sponsors too.
So cheaper, better quality, and I'm not a walking advert!
That's because Fanatics took over the jersey manufacture and cut the quality. Fanatics sucks in all sort of dimensions.
I don't think it's uniquely Fanatics. All kinds of "luxury" brands have been dropping their quality standards for several decades now. And not for making some mass market cheaper products, but on their regular supposedly "luxury" lines.
They made a name over decades and now they're going to ride the name till the end of the company.
I really do wonder if MBA == evil.
Doc Martin are absolute trash now. Managed to destroy a pair within a few months....
Is fanatic some localized term for capitalists I'm not aware of?
But as the Frankfurt School Famously said about the Mona Lisa that the copies make the original. In other words the copies give the original all the publicity to make it famous.
They said that, but it was already quite famous for centuries. As were other paintings, not copied, and not involved in some high publicity heist like it.
That was exactly the point. The fame came from the number of copies of the painting.
Some people say brands like Gucci became more famous because of the number copies made.
Solvair now make the real Dr Martens (in the UK)! The high street brand that owns the name makes all theirs in the far East. Check out Solvair if you can find them, they are better quality.
This is like a reverse-dupe situation. The people who actually made the boots (NPS, a co-op in the UK) never owned the brand [0]. Then in 2013, the brand was acquired by a PE company [1] who did what PE companies do and got cheap, nasty, versions of the boot made in East Asia.
So the "dupe" non-branded version is actually the original, and much, much better quality than the branded official version of the product.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovair [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Martens
It’s Solovair, not Solvair.
Also if you want legit ones, including vintage, check out the UK Boot Company in Camden Town.
Oops. Thanks for the correction.
The British Boot Company (britboot.co.uk)
Sad but true, but sometimes the brand itself is responsible for this as they cost optimize production and offshore their products.
If the dupe market isn't doing it the wonks inside are busy selling off the brand name as fast as they can.
Seems about the only kitchen things you can trust now are cast iron, carbon steel and sheet pans, because you can’t really do much to cheapen them in terms of materials except take them offshore (and most of the brands like Lodge are proudly domestic). After spending some time in culinary I started buying stuff from restaurant stores. It’s not always pretty but it tends to be a lot more practical. Glad Cambro is on there.
I’ve also started to pick up ceramics from local makers as there are a lot of potters lurking around. Often the prices are good, certainly comparable to the luxury consumer brands like Wedgewood.
Also we’re a Makita household, not because the usual options are insufficient for home use, but they’re one of the only independent power tool makers left. Most other hand tools I try and buy vintage/restored when I’m in Europe as they’re much cheaper than in the US.
Point6 as a successor to IceBreaker I didn’t know about. There are very few good merino companies and apparently their conglomerate also owns Smartwool.
And copper pans. They need re-tinning every now and again, but they'll last forever.
> kitchen things
Made in Japan: Gangy 300 can opener. No moving parts, just a handle of heavy stamped steel, with a stainless claw blade riveted on. Last opener I'll ever need. $12 online from the usual suspect.
Yup, need a new term like reputation hacking to use a good reputation to sell lower quality products or increase prices, sometimes from a new owner.
Isn't this just another form of enshittification.
Cool website! Some examples I was aware of before:
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/dr-martens
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/corningware
I didn't know WMF got acquired and is doing some heavy restructuring. If the quality reduces that would be really sad to see
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/wmf
Amazing resource, thanks for posting it.
I asked my wife once, how to tell whether a fashion accessory is a knock-off. She said: “look at the woman”.
There is a whole world of signalling that many of us are completely oblivious to.
sounds like some racist stuff.
I remember buying a Nike Tshirt in the early 2000s: good quality, and still looking decent today. Nowadays most of the Nike/Adidas/etc stuff is very low quality fabric and not necessarily cheap (at least in Western Europe)
It’s not cheaper fabric. It’s “better” - lighter, stronger, recycled
It's cheaper for the manufacturer. Not necessarily for the consumer.
Style seems to me to be one of those things that shouldn't have IP. Oh no, what happens if it isn't protected? Society spends less money on parasitic fashion?
For the vast majority of human existence 'dupe culture' was the norm.
So far this is just a tiny 200 year abberation.
The centralisation is abnormal. Used to have one blacksmith in each village making clone horseshoes and earning a living. Now there's one company in South Korea that makes all the world's horseshoes and earns a million livings while each village has minus one living. And the guy who invented the horseshoe is sleeping under a bridge.
The other side of that is where there was a factory for the villagers to work in, and everybody had a wage, and a community.
The factory is now all robots, and only 3 people have a job there.
Centralization offers efficiency gains, else it won't happen. Your imaginary company in South Korea likely makes a million horseshoes employing only 1000 people, and the horseshoes are good quality, and the price is like 5% of the price of a handcrafted horseshoe. Many more people can afford horseshoes as a result.
But think of the jobs! There used to be a million people involved in horseshoe-making, now there is only a thousand, and the rest of that million now has to do something else! And since there is literally nothing else for them to do, they'll have to die out :(
The most bizarre thing about the economical systems is that there indeed were cases where former workers of the industries that collapsed/disappeared indeed went the way of the dodo.
It depends on the speed of change though. If a million-strong industry collapses overnight, it can lead to really painful social disturbances. If it winds down in 10 years, the transition can be much more smooth.
BTW see also https://www.edge.org/conversation/gin-television-and-cogniti...
At the start of the last century the UK had a million people working in the coal mining industry. Now it is effectively zero.
That reduction happened over a long period but it wasn't without its problems. Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.
Maybe the village hasn't recovered but what about the descendants of the miners who now work service jobs in London?
It's the descendants that don't leave that cause all the problems.
> Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.
Are villages the correct unit to look at there though? Do individuals from these villages now have worse opportunities than they had before?
Very much so, nothing was done to even give them opportunities to get work anywhere else either. And then on top of that the Tories destroyed everything else.
This is an intentional policy choice btw. You could just legislate the horseshoe company pays 90% of each displaced blacksmith decreasing by 5% per year.
And hey, almost a million blacksmiths displaced is a huge block of voters that any elected politician would be glad to capture! Although I struggle to recall any of the examples of something like this happening in the real-world history.
Just shows how powerful capital interests are.
I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper. And the consumers in the village prefer cheap shoes to locally made (expensive) ones.
Fundamentally consumers like cheap stuff. Manufacturing shifts happen because as soon as there's a cheaper output, you've won. Consumers will reliably switch to cheap. At the start there may be some brand loyalty, there may even be a quality difference, but both those erode quickly.
Lots of people promote the idea of buying locally, even if it's more expensive. But it's a hard message to sell, and a tough one to buy. I'm sorry for the blacksmith, but times are hard and I need my horses shod.
It's easy to blame capitalism or factory owners or foreign cheap labor or any other convenient political scapegoat. But the root of the problem is consumer preference for cheap (even if inferior) to the exclusion of everything else.
This is perhaps culturally most evident where the premise above is false. In the US for example food is low quality, but plentiful. In Europe food generally costs more, but is of a much higher standard. Portions are smaller. Quality is more important than quantity.
This is not by accident. Europe has deliberately fostered local food markets, local food production, and promoted a narrative around history and good production. Cheap food is available, but quality food has a strong foothold.
> In Europe food generally costs more
Is this actually true?
As to your general point, I don't think the blame can lie with the consumer as the consumer almost always does not have the expertise to recognize quality and understand the consequences of buying lower quality. Nor can you expect everyone to be an expert in everything. Without that expertise, buying a more expensive product is a gamble while a lower priced one is at least a known quantity even if it isn't the theoretically best deal.
No, 10-15% higher in the US, even when they have lower quality and consume higher amounts of it.
Look up "race to the bottom", a term that describes lose-lose situations resulting from rational market dynamics.
But, of course, there's no law of nature saying that we have to organise our society according to "rational" market dynamics. Many writers (famously Adam Smith) have opined on the subject.
> I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.
There is difference between the political power and the economical power. The economical power of the aggregate consumer is vast, but it's unconsolidated, and doesn't usually translate into the political power. The economical power of several centralized/monopolized producers is also vast, but it's consolidated and usually does translate into the political power. Plus, you know, class consciousness and all that — the gentlemen and the nobles in the Parliament may bicker and backstab each other, but the moment the peasants revolt against the Enclosure Acts, they put their differences behind them and start the hangings.
> Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper.
Yeah, but they can speed their victory up by paying the legislature (or straight up being a large part of that legislature) to crack down on those small-scale manufacturers. License the blacksmithing itself, require obtaining certificates of quality for horseshoes for sale, and tax shoe-fitting unless it's done with the authorized horseshoes — and that's only barely scratching the surface.
That's also a way to create a new royalty class.
You should share your crystal ball that tells you the future so you can help leaders accurately predict changes in supply and demand curves so that they can make better policy choices.
Many fewer people can afford horseshoes as a result because all the money is at the horseshoe company.
The opposite is actually true in reality. More people can afford X than ever before, for nearly any X that doesn’t involve directly paying for someone else’s labor.
Depends on the overarching economical policies. During the British rule, the Indian textile weavers went out of manufacturing business and had to switch to sustenance farming, and then perish during one of the many famines. And the Parliament legally forbade the public relief efforts, such as fundraisers to buy and send corn to the affected regions, explicitly citing the concerns that such efforts would skew the market forces and unbalance the trade.
That seems less an indictment of economies of scale, and more an indictment of british colonialism
What doesn't involve paying for someone else's labor? You mean things that are pure profit?
You’re missing the word “directly.”
More people can afford to buy a toilet than ever before. The same may not be true of affording a plumber to install it.
Well, the guy who invented the horseshoe died thousands of years ago.
And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
Basic Ricardian Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_economics
Of course, that doesn’t mean the blacksmith isn’t out of a job, but I always hate that so many people think the solution to that problem is to just give up the economic benefits of specialization instead of working to improve the distribution of the gains.
>And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Ignoring all the possitive other effects as well.
I've come to view the goal of things being cheap as an anti goal. The biggest contribution to us speed running killing our ecosystems. Maybe all of us going without more often would end up with a significantly higher standard of living in the long term.
You do that by properly pricing in externalities, not by making everything harder to do so we can't put as much strain on the environment.
You are probably right that we need to have less stuff, but if we are going to have less, I would rather work less, too.
Externalities must be accounted for. Once that’s done, cheap should correlate well with being less ecologically harmful.
>Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
And for a village that had 50 such specialties... they can make do with 49 specialties. Then with 48. And 45 as well. 25 eventually. But some day in the future, their great-grandchildren wake up, and there are no jobs. That Korean factory even ships in tractors, so there's no farm labor work to be had for the 200 who didn't have a specialty. But the food still costs money. And it doesn't matter if the village is gone because those people moved to the city, there's not much work there either. And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
Who is this good for? Is it good for you?
> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.
> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?
Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).
Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.
It's unethical to reduce population by making people starve to death.
Of course it is. I have no idea why you'd suggest such a thing.
The population is still growing because people are living longer. There aren't many places left in the world with above replacement birth rates.
I think this is missing the part of the story where the blacksmith in South Korea comes to open a shop in your backyard and yet you delay them for years for inane reasons.
sure, but if the blacksmith starting passing off really shitty horseshoes he'd get driven out of town
The village grew as the world got smaller. The world has one blacksmith.
https://archive.is/JCEan
The real dupes are people without money to burn buying the originals at 10 and 20 times the cost, due to marketing convincing them goods made with the same materials, in similar (or even the same) factories, and often using sweatshop like labor, are somehow hand-crafted objects of luxury.
And then you have Swatch, making cheaper versions of the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, as almost a licensed dupe (though since both are owned by the same parent company, it's almost more of an iPhone SE to an iPhone Pro comparison, in a way).
This kind of leaves out the biggest question imo which is that of quality.
Usually, dupe's sacrifice quality for price. The fact that a market exists for this at all indicates a strong consumer acceptance of lower quality items.
I do wonder, if the "premium" option were to never exist, would these "dupes" even exist in the first place as they seem to enjoy an "implied" quality that the premium option pays for, whilst cannibalizing sales.
>> Usually, dupe's sacrifice quality for price. The fact that a market exists for this at all indicates a strong consumer acceptance of lower quality items.
I think it is the other way around, too many brands lowered their quality enough that general consumers no longer believe (or perceive) the "premium" options to be worth it.
Might as well gamble and get the cheapest option that does not hurt the wallet too much, when high-quality is so rare these days.
I don't think its a given that knock offs sacrifice quality rather than markup for their lower prices.
"Dupe" might need to be more specific. What is copied? Is it design, brand name, quality, parts or functionality? What is not to be copied? and why?
Dupe might affect the seller, but customer doesn't care much. In the past, people had to go by brand name as an assurance of quality. We have other means now. Reviews from other buyers, detailed specifications, return policies - all reduced the moat of branding. People can now buy any brand that has specifications they want, use reviews for quality assurance and it's easy to return the product if required. Brand is not playing the same role it used to.
We have nothing of the sort. Reviews are bought and manipulated at scale. Dupe brands come and go month to month. Very few of the electronics I've bought on Amazon in the last 8 years are still for sale, but for most of them there are current listings with the same pictures and a "different" brand name.
Most reviews that aren't fake are useless and written within the first few days of ownership anyway .
Also Amazon very intentionally structures it's business to allow these activities to happen.
Like stock mixing.
> In the past, people had to go by brand name as an assurance of quality. We have other means now.
Yeah, brand reputation doesn't work as a guide to quality any more.
But I don't think we have any other means of reliably identifying quality yet.
> what is not being copied and why?
Most counterfeits goods skimp on manufacturing quality. Like instead of very detailed stitching with intricate design they might just skip that altogether. For instance one of the easiest ways to identify dupes is if the brand name and design on a bag 'flows' to the other side. Obv counterfeits dont really care because they want to save money
For counterfeit goods that are so high quality 1) they would only show pictures of it, not the real thing and 2) only cost like 1/3 of the brand price.
Aka that $600 bag would still cost $200 if it had identical quality. This is all based on what business owners told me from when I visited counterfeit markets in China
There are entire subreddits these days dedicated to reviewing fashion reps.
And the amount some people throw on products just because they're reps.
£15K rolex for £2k, yeah no thanks.
For luxury brand bags that cost $2-10k you pay around $300-600 for high quality counterfeits, but they really are almost identical. Sometimes they are higher quality.
Do consumers care? Almost always not. But to say the quality is the same is incorrect
Fender makes dupes of its iconic instruments. If someone said, making dupes of Fender guitars is Fender's core business, I wouldn't argue.
There's an ongoing lawsuit with another guitar maker who essentially is claimng something like the fender guitar body is basically independently / evolutionarily the only good body style and that there's a convergence and so it's like trying to patent the shape of a saxophone or violin
It's interesting you used both saxophone and violin as your examples, as they are very different historically.
Violins are basically ancient and evolved gradually over huge time spans, yes.
But saxophones -- invented by a guy named Adolph Sax and patented in France in 1846! It really was a kind of new thing, combining aspects of brass and woodwind instruments in ways that hadn't been done before. I think it's fair to say he invented it as a new instrument. (What legal protection that should get how is another story, I don't know that I like patents honestly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone
Sax was really mad about manufacturers reverse engineering and copying his saxophone without a license and tried suing them etc, for the period before his patent expired, but it was still being copied a lot -- it was a new thing people were excited about. Once the patent expired, it was definitely a free for all.
> Violins are basically ancient and evolved gradually over huge time spans,
Hey! I understand your point and you are completely right about violins and saxophones being completely different, but it is simply not right to use the word "ancient" with violins.
We know pretty much exactly how and when the violin evolved. If you found a viola or another instrument from the 1500s you would perhaps say that it's violin-like, but it's clearly not a violin. The Stradivarius is from the 1600s, the modern concert form is from the 1800s. Any which way it is far from being ancient.
A better example of ancient instruments is the flute and the drum. They are truly ancient, have existed in many cultures, and we do not know when they were first built.
thanks! I obv knew less about violins than saxophones!
Either way if it's functional then at most you get 20 years of protection. What's shared in both cases is that you can't trademark the shape.
I started buying dupe frags recently given how ridiculous frag price has become.
Yeah they kind of messed up the in-world economy by making gold worthless. I’m waiting for them to release an update where they finally have a sink in place. The duping problem should resolve itself after that.
Ain't no one got the money to afford the real thing, and influencers keep throwing the real thing into our faces.