China Bit #1: Fakes

I am all for the fancy originals!!!!!.....when you are at the point in your life when you can afford them. I am not there yet. So, for now a part of every China trip is going to the Dongguan Wal-Mart to get fakes. Wal-Mart is not the Wal-Mart as we know it: it is more of a mall type of set up with small stores. Usually I get watches - I am not a sucker for a bag and my wife likes to pick her own - , but this time I am lucky enough to be traveling with our Italian footwear veteran, who is a character -  just image an Italian stereotype man gesticulating and being loud. Besides chain-smoking, rocking a Moncler jacket, speaking Italinglish, calling everyone "my friend", and being extremely entertaining, he knows where to go for good fakes.

So, the way it works is that there is a front store, which sells cheap, bad-quality fakes. You have to ask them to take you upstairs. They walk you into another store with blacked out windows. Now the selection gets better! Pick whatever label you like. From here on you gotta bargain, and everyone has different strategies. I ended up picking up a couple of things, which I think I still overpaid for, but the quality was very good.

That was the side of the consumer. What about the companies that are "losing" millions of dollars by having their designs knocked off or overproduced and sold for less? Are they being violated? I think that the fake business produces a great deal of advertisement for the brands all over the world and the best part is that it is free!!! A bunch of brands are already "knocking off" their own product and creating a low price point sub-brands which carry the same products but dumbed down for the mass audiences and make buying fakes for the sake of brand name logos plain stupid!!! 

As a designer, in this case, I think after the initial design is out, it is almost a compliment that it is being copied!!! It doesn't matter that Fila knocked off the Prada sneaker...everyone still refers to it as the "Prada" shoe...and it is still being sold....and most people still want the original!!!

I hope that you understand that I do not condone the fake business; I simply look at it realistically.