Hacker News

> 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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

Cool website! Some examples I was aware of before:

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/dr-martens

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/corningware

Amazing resource, thanks for posting it.

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

sounds like some racist stuff.

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

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.

>> 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.

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 .

> 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'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