 |
|
|
|||||
On June 27, Lululemon filed a lawsuit alleging that Costco has infringed on its copyright with several knockoff athleisure products. Its just the latest chapter in a story of dupe design thats plagued Lululemon for years. According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Lululemon takes issue with a number of Costco products that it says are intended to mimic its popular designs, including the $128 Define jacket, the $118 Scuba oversize half-zip hoodie, and the $128 ABC trouser. The documents lay out an in-depth explanation for Lululemon’s identification of these dupes, pointing to details like the ornamental lines on the front of the Define jacket and the construction of the ABC pants back seam as examples of intellectual property copied by Costco in its own line of jackets and pants. As details of the lawsuit emerge, the overwhelming majority of commenters on social media are landing firmly on Costcos side of this debate. It seems that dupe design culture is becoming so normalized that many consumers view it as standard practice. Lululemon and the rise of dupe culture In recent years, dupe design culture has been taking over the way we shop. From makeup brand copycats to luxury furniture look-alikes and fragrance knockoffs, its likely that if youve been in the market for a higher-end product recently youve stumbled across a cheaper version of said product that seems suspiciously familiar. For Lululemon, this cycle is turning into a tale as old as time. On TikTok, the hashtag #lululemondupe currently yields more than 11,000 videos; videos of affordable dupes of Lululemon products routinely garner hundreds of thousands of views. Lululemon points to this trend in its suit against Costco. There is even a hashtag LululemonDupes on social media platforms such as TikTok that social media influencers use when promoting these copycat products, the documents read. The Infringing Products create an improper association with [Lululemons] authentic products. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, copyright infringement occurs “when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.” That can look different depending on the industry, but in the fashion world it generally protects patented clothing designs that are artistic rather than utilitarian in nature. For example, Lululemon argues in its lawsuit that the ornamental features of the Define jacket are “not essential to the function of the product,” meaning those features are not a “competitive necessity” for other companies’ apparel products, and therefore should belong to Lululemon alone. This isnt the first time Lululemon has stood up against alleged copycats. Back in 2021, the brand filed a lawsuit against Pelotona former collaboratorarguing that the fitness company had stolen its womens athleisure designs, a claim that was ultimately settled out of court in 2022. Lululemon then took a softer tack against dupes in 2023, when it hosted an event encouraging consumers with Lululemon dupes to trade them in for the real thing. Its a trend we dont see going away anytime soon. So we decided to actually lean in and embrace it, rather than pretend its not there, Nikki Neuburger, Lululemons chief brand officer, told Fast Company at the time. The internet sides with Costco Now Lululemon is once again objecting to what it sees as infringing designs, but in the court of public opinion, it appears the brand has already lost. On TikTok, one video from the user @thatssority explained Lululemons argument that Costcos alleged infringing products might cause customer confusion. Per the actual legal filing, Upon information and belief, some customers incorrectly believe these Infringing Products are authentic lululemon apparel while still other customers specifically purchase the Infringing Products because they are difficult to distinguish from authentic lululemon products. (Potential customer confusion is often the basis for trademark infringement litigation as well.) Several commenters took issue with Lululemons assertion that Costcos products might be confused for theirs: Not a single person has ever been confused about if theyre buying lulu or kirkland, one comment with more than 30,000 likes reads. Boycott lululemon because I dont play about Costco, another adds. Explanatory TikToks from news sources like ABC 7 LA and CBS Mornings have garnered an influx of similar responses, with commenters largely expressing their frustration at Lululemons prices, pledging their support for Costco, and echoing the idea that no one would ever mistake Costco apparel for Lululemon. While dupes have certainly been around for a while, it appears that the threshold for public acceptance of these products is getting lowerespecially when the dupes are targeting a major corporation like Lululemon rather than a small business.
Category:
E-Commerce
More than half of Americans now use a chatbot, with an increasing number of people replacing search engines with large language model (LLM)-powered chat queries to navigate the web and find answers. In general, the quality of these outputs is improving as the underlying models get better. However, the challenge of processing so much information means AI models sometimes misfire, hallucinating detailsincluding website URLs. One analysis of 18,000 landing page visits from ChatGPT found that the AI system included the wrong URL in roughly one out of every 33 links. Sometimes, the mistake is just a single letter off; other times, the URL is entirely fabricated. The result is that website hosts are beginning to adapt, trying to capture this traffic and redirect it to the intended target. From designing new 404 error pages that explain what may have gone wrong and offer contextual links, to creating on-the-fly contentoften with the help of AI tools themselvesvarious strategies are being deployed. These efforts arent quite AI engine optimization, the anticipated successor to traditional search engine optimization (SEO), but they reflect a growing urgency as users shift from Google searches to chatbot interactions. They’re an attempt to acknowledge and improve the experience of those who land on websites via AI hallucinations or errors. Jack Arturo, who runs WP Fusion, a WordPress plug-in, has noticed the impact of artificial intelligence on traffic to his site. Data shared with Fast Company shows that in September 2024, ChatGPT was responsible for less than 0.5% of his referral traffic. A year ago, it didnt really exist as a referrer, he explains. But if we go for the last 30 days, its number threewell, actually, really number two, after Google, because these are direct visits, he says. Most of the AI chatbot traffic Arturo receives is directed to live pages. But in line with broader trends, about three out of every 100 links are broken. Until recently, those users landed on WP Fusions standard 404 page, similar to many others that have existed on the web for decades. It informs visitors that something went wrong and the page cant be found, suggesting they use the on-site search tool to locate what theyre looking for. Still, it seemed like a missed opportunity to auto-redirect a chatbot-referred visitor to something more relevant than a generic Ooops message. To address that, Arturo built an AI-powered system that generates content for nonexistent pages that users were sent to. We know what they’re looking for based on the title, Arturo explains. Why not just generate something for them? The system took only about an hour to set up, but Arturo believes the time was well spent and expects future enhancements will be, too. We see the traffic increasing consistently from those sources, he says. I think it’s worth spending some time and getting it right, and then we’ve open-sourced it, so ideally, other people would contribute. SEO experts agree that website owners will need to adapt as AI chatbots become more embedded in everyday browsing. LLMs have a tendency to hallucinate URLs that dont exist, so if the user clicks on them, they will land on your 404 page, says SEO expert Lily Ray. This makes it important for site owners to rethink how 404 pages function and to guide users toward the content they were originally seeking. The best way to provide an optimal UX [user experience] on 404 pages is to provide messaging about the content not being found and include links to important pages on the site, says Ray, who also suggests incorporating standard site navigation into the 404 page template. Arturo, for his part, acknowledges this is yet another case of AI systems creating new challenges for those not involved in their development. It would be nice if it sent them to the correct page, he says. But he adds that even AI companies may not fully understand how their models behave and may not be able to fix the issue right away. Until they fix itif they can fix itwe just have to kind of adapt and work around it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Janet Feldman spent 20 years working in footwear. As VP of her family’s business, she flew to Asia, supervised factory operations, and negotiated with suppliers. Then her father had a stroke, and her life took a twist. All of his life, Feldman’s father had been staunchly independent. Now, he struggled to get get up from a chair without a helping hand. Feldman bought all of the lift recliners she could find on the market. These chairs were designed to help people transition between sitting and standing by tilting their entire bodies forward, but none of them fit the bill. Some were monstrously big. Others were plain ugly. Every single one of them reclined in such a way that her father slid out of it when he reclined. Then Feldman came to a resolve. “Finally, I said, you know what? I’ll make my own chair,” she recalls. Feldman saw a gap in the market for a chair that performs better than any other lift chairand looks good while doing it. “I wanted to have a beautiful chair that anybody would be proud to have in the living room. She left her family business, and in 2014, started her own company, called Assistance With Elegance. Ten years, eight patents, and a pandemic later, she is now launching her company’s first product: the Awe chair. While other lift chairs push up from the floor, the Awe chair never leaves the ground. The only thing that lifts is the seat itself, which makes for a much more elegant experience. To prevent anyone from sliding out, the chair comes with an ingenious footrest that glides out as the chair reclines and scoops up your feet into place. It took 10 years to make, and two years to figure out the footrest alone. Its cost is $10,000. A chair for the “silver tsunami” When Feldman became her father’s caregiver, she noticed that people, including doctors, started to look at her instead of him. “Old people, they’re invisible,” she told me. “Nobody wants to look at old people because nobody wants to be old, and it’s sad to look at what we’re all going to be.” It’s high time we started looking, because 73 million Americans, or one-quarter of the U.S. population today, is between 60 and 78 years old. By 2035, the Census Bureau estimates that older adults will outnumber American minors. The so-called silver tsunami is projected to fuel an economic boom: By 2050, people over 50 are projected to generate more than $28trillion globally. And yet, the elderly are still largely left out of design meetings. They’re seldom the target audience for new product launches. Over the past few years, the tide has been turning, albeit slowly. Independent designers like Sarah Hossli and Lanzavecchia + Wai have each designed their own version of a chair that helps the elderly get up with dignity and grace. More broadly, Remsen makes pill containers that look like jewelry boxes. Boom Home Medical makes pastel-colored bedside urinals that look like flower vases. Can Go specializes in high-tech smart canes with GPS and activity tracking, an integrated flashlight, and cellular data for emergency phone calls. The Awe chair sits within this ecosystem, and Feldman hopes to keep expanding the offerings. “We do realize that not everybody’s going to like a club chair. Some people might want much more modern designs,” she says. “It was so hard to do just this, that we figured we’d start really small and focused.” From the dreamworld to reality The look and feel of the Awe chair quite literally came to Feldman in a dream: “I wanted an old-style club chair that your grandfather would sit in,” she remembers. Brown, crinkly, straight from 1929, but with a modern takeand, of course, the technology to go with it. The chair comes in two sizes and seven colors, including midnight blue, crimson red, and emerald green. For now, it is available directly to customers via the company’s website; the team is also hoping to partner with high-end assisted living facilities, airport lounges, and even golf clubs. Feldman isn’t a designer, so she surrounded herself well. The chair was designed in collaboration with Jessica Banks, a robotics expert who runs a studio in Brooklyn, New York, that focuses on robotics and furniture design. It was engineered in Germany, with motors from China, and handcrafted in North Carolina, with leathers from Italy. Feldman declined to share how much it cost her to bring it to market, in part “because it’s still so shocking to me,” she says, noting she is now selling her house in West Hampton to replenish the coffers. Earlier this month, I went out to the company’s offices in SoHo to try it out. As the seat gently lifted me, I thought of my grandfather, whose weakened arms could no longer push him up from his old armchair. As the chair gently lowered me back down, I thought of the thud he would make when he sat back down, letting gravity do the work his knees no longer could. Of the four people who were at the office that day, three of them had experienced a similar moment with their parents or grandparents. “It’s such a common experience,” Feldman said. Every other touchpoint was carefully thought through. The edges of the front of the armrests are slightly recessed, which provides an extra handgrip when getting up. A cupholder is built straight into the armrest. A side pocket lets you store glasses or a book. Of the chairs Feldman’s father tried, all had pockets that were too far down to reach. “We just raised the pocket,” she says. “All you have to do is look at how people use things.” One of Feldman’s biggest pet peeves with other chairs was the lack of a footrest to stop people from sliding outbut adding one turned out to be more challenging than expected. Her team cycled through factories in Michigan and Florida that make airline chairs or theater chairs, but they couldn’t build the right mechanism. The German factory she ended up partnering with went bankrupt twice before resuming business. Finally, they found a way to coordinate the reclining flap and the footrest so that the footrest slides out until the two meet to form a “T.” A safety curtain at the bottom prevents small pets or children from crawling under. These features are almost enough to make you forget about the sticker shock. t $10,000, the Awe chair is almost 10 times more expensive than the average lift recliner in the U.S., which is between $700 and $1,500. Feldman is sensitive to the price tag and hopes to follow through with a more affordable line that’s “maybe not made in Germany, maybe not using Italian leathers.” She also knows that her target audienceretired boomershas a lot more disposable income than the average working American. “I know it’s a very high price. But for now, we feel like it’s such a beautiful, special chair.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||