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 closely resemble UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had replicated 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.”
And the culture is, undoubtedly, thriving. While it used to be embarrassing to own a fake, that’s no longer the case. Today, if you can find a cheaper, knock-off alternative – that’s a life hack. In our online age, social media and online shopping exist saturated with copies, dupes, and knock-off versions of name-brand products. Rather than outright counterfeits, these products carefully step around trademark and copyright rules with the express purpose of offering consumers cheaper alternatives to something a different brand created. It’s become an entire industry, embraced by influencers and companies like Quince.
Here are a few things that have been duped recently: makeup, Le Creuset Dutch ovens, hand sanitizer, designer perfumes, Apple AirPods Max, Oura Ring fitness trackers, viral phone cases, dishwasher pods, famous banana pudding recipes, Pilates workouts, and the entire island of Santorini. “We could probably surmise that there will be even more dupes in the future. There are more dupes than have ever existed in the history of mankind right now.”
Dupe culture is this idea that the limitlessness of the internet allows you to find a cheaper alternative, a copy, something that is a reasonable stand-in for the thing that you actually want. And it has permeated every industry: guitars, clothing, makeup, food, recipes. There are dupes for Lululemon pants. There are dupes for Birkin bags, which are incredibly exorbitant, notoriously hard to purchase designer handbags that go for tens of thousands of dollars. There was a $50 version for sale at Walmart. It was called the ‘Wirkin.’
What’s different now is that dupes are kind of just a way of life, in that you don’t have to go somewhere seedy or weird or black market-y and deal with somebody shady to get a dupe. Anything you can think of, dupe culture means that there is a dupe out there somewhere. But it’s walking a line, being very careful not to infringe on things like trademarks or copyright.
Dupe dot com is a thing. Dupe.com, basically, you can copy a URL to any product, plug it into dupe.com, and it will do a reverse image search of the web and find products that look similar. Some of them might be cheaper, some of them might be expensive, but the whole idea is you’re looking for lookalikes. A lot of modern online shopping actually has all the tools you need to find a dupe. Amazon, for example, just introduced a new feature where you can write out a text version of what you’re looking for, and it will use AI to generate an image of what it thinks you’re describing and then use that AI-generated image to look for similar products. It’s basically a reverse image search.
TikTok has a feature where if you pause a video, it will highlight products in the video and you can click those products and find similar-looking dupes on TikTok Shop. So finding dupes has never been easier because a lot of these features are built into the platforms that we’re using in the first place. When copying and pasting a URL into dupe.com or all these reverse image searches, where do we end up on the legality? That’s sort of the billion dollar question: What is allowed? Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but when IP attorneys describe this to me, they always answer with ‘It depends’. When you get down to something like fashion, a lot of it is not protectable. No one should be able to own that specific thing. And just because a fast-fashion company were to rip this off, is there legal grounds to sue them? Maybe not. Just because two products look the same doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s illegal.
The public’s engagement with dupe culture is endlessly fascinating to me because people have a lot of thoughts. Often, the thoughts are, ‘Of course I’m going to buy a dupe of a Birkin because I can’t afford a $50,000 handbag. If there’s a cheaper alternative, I’m just going to buy that because poor people deserve nice things too, or I shouldn’t have to be mega-wealthy to afford a bag that I like.’ That thinking often shapes the dupe discourse.
It gets messy and it gets really heated and emotional, I think, because we’re talking about something that Americans love to do, which is to consume, which is to shop. People get really defensive and protective of what they’re able to buy and the morality of dupes. This is my hot take, but I think when you have a dupe, you still long to own the original product. And in that way, it’s doing the opposite of putting them out of business. It’s actually making them even more aspirational.