The trend of creating "dupes," which are products designed to closely imitate the appearance and function of more expensive and often branded goods is definitely not something new. Herman Miller launched a campaign called "Beware of Imitations" as early as 1957. However, a mix of trends on social media, large online retailers, and skilled manufacturers in China has propelled dupes to become a much more widespread phenomenon. Data from Google Trends clearly shows the surge in popularity of the phenomenon since 2010:

In the last years a number of consumer comparison shopping services have appeared which makes it simple for consumers to find knockoff products of a design they really like. One of the latest additions is a web service called dupe.com, created by a couple of well-respected Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Nikita Bier. This service makes it very easy for a consumer set on a specific product to find affordable dupes. Searching for Louis Poulsen’s PANTHELLA 160 PORTABLE, for example, finds an almost identical looking copy offered at AliExpress:

Because Loupe has built similar AI technology in-house underlying services like Dupes.com for more than half a decade, in order to help brands - we can make an educated guess who it works. Rather than searching on brand and product name Dupes identifies the product and it’s attributes from the image and are able to find visually similar products from the web. At it’s core this is not much different from Google Lens. However, a nisched comparison shopping service can make optimisations that makes it much more effective at finding cheaper products that looks very similar to the original design which the consumer is interested to buy at a discount.

Dupes.com was launched three weeks ago at the time of writing this blog post. It is probably not steering away large number of consumers from purchasing the original design pieces just yet. But services like this does make it much easier for consumers to find knockoffs compared to before and they will only get better from here. Because of this, furniture and design brands needs to understand this trend and new technology that fuels it. Brands with a prepared mind and strategies in place to handle dupes will stand to gain as the dupe trend continues.

How to find dupes of your brand’s products

Understanding the knockoffs

The first step for brands is to understand the knockoffs of their original designs being offered. Loupe have first-hand experience finding knockoff products both on large retailer marketplaces such as Wayfair and Amazon but also on nisched furniture retailers which offer furniture products in both premium and affordable product ranges. The first thing that brands we help usually want to understand is if knockoff products are being offered at the same online retailers as the brand’s own products.

The reason for this is intuitive since having a cheaper copy of your product offered for sale beside your brands product would hurt sales more than in the example below where AliExpress offered a cheap knockoff for consumers which never really were in the market for the original.

Identifying exact copies

Finding visually similar products is one thing, but what brands really are after is identifying exact copies of their products. To do this, one need to identify similarly looking products whose dimensions, such as length and width, matches within +/- 99% to the brand’s proprietary design. Copies found which are both aesthetically similar and matching the exact dimensions of your brand’s products are usually what brands are most interested in identifying.

Finding images being used

Occasionally, we find instances when not only a knockoff product is being offered but the original brand’s product images are also being used. This is, off course, making the violation even worse and can potentially easily deceive consumers.

Find dupes by putting your retailer's under the Loupe

With the analytics service from Loupe, a design brand are able to understand exactly where your online products are being sold and how they are presented to consumers in terms of images, product text and pricing. In the work that we do for brands we scan every single product at your online retailers website to identify and match our customers products. In this process we also find knockoff products almost on a daily basis. We find knockoff products both on large retailer marketplaces such as Wayfair and Amazon but also on nisched furniture retailers which offers furniture products in both premium and affordable product ranges.

Based on these findings, we provide our customers with a comprehensive understanding of some of the closest and potentially most damaging dupes. Brands can give us instructions on how closely matched on for example dimensions they want to filter out potential new dupes on. Rather than having to use a consumer shopping service to find potential dupes all over the world, our service identifies potential copies on any product in your entire product catalogue at your most important retailers.

Make sure to contact us to learn how you can protect your brand and get the ROI your beautiful originally created designs deserve.