Dupes took over the world

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)

uxhacker2• 3 days ago

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.

secabeen• 3 days ago

That's because Fanatics took over the jersey manufacture and cut the quality. Fanatics sucks in all sort of dimensions.

marysol57• 2 days ago

Incidentally I've seen some where they've taken off the sponsors too.

So cheaper, better quality, and I'm not a walking advert!

matheusmoreira• 3 days ago

Amazing resource, thanks for posting it.

throwaway219450• 3 days ago

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.

everybodyknows• 3 days ago

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.

julian_t2• 3 days ago

And copper pans. They need re-tinning every now and again, but they'll last forever.

pir8life4me• 3 days ago

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.

t0mpr1c35• 3 days ago

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.

marcus_holmes2• 3 days ago

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

DoneWithAllThat2• 3 days ago

It’s Solovair, not Solvair.

Also if you want legit ones, including vintage, check out the UK Boot Company in Camden Town.

brudgers• 7 days ago

Fender makes dupes of its iconic instruments. If someone said, making dupes of Fender guitars is Fender's core business, I wouldn't argue.

calvinmorrison• 3 days ago

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

jrochkind12• 3 days ago

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.

4ndrewl• 3 days ago

For the vast majority of human existence 'dupe culture' was the norm.

So far this is just a tiny 200 year abberation.

inigyou7• 3 days ago

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.

nine_k2• 3 days ago

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.

cortesoft2• 3 days ago

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.

xboxnolifes• 3 days ago

The village grew as the world got smaller. The world has one blacksmith.

cyberrock• 3 days ago

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.

techterrier• 3 days ago

sure, but if the blacksmith starting passing off really shitty horseshoes he'd get driven out of town

marysol57• 2 days ago

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.

cjs_ac• 3 days ago

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

OJFord• 3 days ago

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.

superfrank• 3 days ago

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

RobotToaster4• 3 days ago

Came here to say this. Deckers UGGs are cheap Chinese knockoffs of the Australian original.

t0mpr1c35• 3 days ago

They are not knockoffs. Ugg boots are a generic product. The Australian manufacturer does not have exclusive rights to the design either.

_carbyau_2• 3 days ago

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...

j1elo• 3 days ago

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.

account426• 3 days ago

Worse, too often name brands even start lowering the quality once the brand has been established.

aprilthird2021• 2 days ago

Businesses don't just price gouge. They often expand their product lines or have R&D to come up with new products and that's more costly than just making the same shoe with the same materials for 40 years. Many consumers feel like "Why do they need to grow? Why can't they just make the product I like and I'll pay for it?" But the reality is that not growing is not protecting yourself from the future. For every product Quince dupes (and they have every right to do them and congrats on their successful business model), there is a brand with a signature product people stopped caring about, and if they hadn't spent the money to expand and try selling new products they may not have survived.

goshcoding• 2 days ago

Serious question: If I wanted to buy quality "boots with the fur" (a.k.a uggs), what is a good brand these days?

(Is Hacker News even the right place to be asking fashion and fashion brand questions?)

exhumet• 2 days ago

im sure there are better, but i believe the "real" uggs are "UGG since 1974" not UGG brand. its very confusing lol

thunderbong• 3 days ago

https://archive.is/JCEan

mschuster91• 3 days ago

Ain't no one got the money to afford the real thing, and influencers keep throwing the real thing into our faces.

dance2die• 3 days ago

I started buying dupe frags recently given how ridiculous frag price has become.

sdevonoes• 3 days ago

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)

tennisflyi• 3 days ago

It’s not cheaper fabric. It’s “better” - lighter, stronger, recycled

callmeal• 3 days ago

It's cheaper for the manufacturer. Not necessarily for the consumer.

pfdietz• 3 days ago

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?

coldtea4• 3 days ago

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.

zkmon• 3 days ago

"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.

Arainach• 3 days ago

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 .

marysol57• 2 days ago

Also Amazon very intentionally structures it's business to allow these activities to happen.

Like stock mixing.

marcus_holmes2• 3 days ago

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.

JimsonYang2• 3 days ago

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

JimsonYang2• 3 days ago

Do consumers care? Almost always not. But to say the quality is the same is incorrect

solumunus• 3 days ago

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.

RobotToaster4• 3 days ago

There are entire subreddits these days dedicated to reviewing fashion reps.

maguay• 3 days ago

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).

superxpro122• 3 days ago

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.

jack1243star• 3 days ago

> 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.

account426• 3 days ago

I don't think its a given that knock offs sacrifice quality rather than markup for their lower prices.

efitz• 3 days ago

I asked my wife once, how to tell whether a fashion accessory is a knock-off. She said: “look at the woman”.

tonyedgecombe4• 3 days ago

There is a whole world of signalling that many of us are completely oblivious to.

dominotw• 3 days ago

sounds like some racist stuff.

sandspar• 2 days ago

When a signal becomes worthless, look for one that's harder to fake.

xnx• 2 days ago

Unfortunately, reviews from publishers and forums tend to be so superficial and/or astroturfed that it's very difficult to judge quality without handling/using item directly.

Dupes took over the world

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