Today, Explained - Everything is dupes

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Fender declared war on guitar makers. Lululemon declared war on Costco. Ugg declared war on Quince. Welcome to the era of the dupe product wars. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers and Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Photo by Francois LOCHON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the show today, we're going to talk about guitars. But don't worry if guitars aren't your thing, because we're also going to talk about Lulu Lemon and lip gloss and ugs and recipes and Doritos and Oreos and the island of Santorini. Do any of those speak to you? Have you figured out what the show's about yet? It's about dupes. It used to be kind of embarrassing to own a fake. Maybe you didn't want your friends to know that your parents bought you store brand fruit loops.

Or maybe your parents didn't want their friends to know that that wasn't real Louis V. But not anymore. We don't even really use the word fake anymore. We use the word dupe. And everyone's getting into the duplication game. And some brands, like Fender, are fighting back. The impact of this could be nuclear. It could be absolutely catastrophic for the guitar industry as a whole.

And we're going to see how that's going for them on today, Explain from Vox. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills.

You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for today's explain comes from Fetch. Fetch is pet insurance if you hadn't figured it out. Do you have a pet? According to a study from a pet insurance company from a few years ago,

every six seconds a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000, and it almost never comes at a convenient time. So check out Fetch. You get paid up to 90% of it. of vet bills. You can use Fetch for any vet in the U.S. and Canada. Every vet is in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Today Explained is here with friend of the show, Charlie Harding, host of co-host of the Switched-on Pop podcast, which if you're not listened to, why? Why? Charlie, we're here to talk to about

And it turns out you're surrounded by guitars. Is there a Fender Stratocaster back there? I feel like there is. Yeah, I got a Fender Stratocaster, Fender Telecaster. You are clearly a guitar player. Yes. And there is a fight right now in guitar world. Tell us about the fight.

It's a guitar battle. So Fender, who are known for making the famed Stratocaster guitar, have recently been issuing cease and desist letters to other guitar builders, telling them, you got to stop producing guitars that, look like our stratacasters. Fender fired shots yesterday. Today, they just launched a full-scale invasion. I got a letter here, a copy of a cease-and-assist letter,

that a U.S. boutique guitar builder received three days ago. Basically, it says, dear sirs or madams, we're writing to you in the name and on behalf of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. Our clients has claims against you to cease and desist from further marketing such guitars, disclosure of information. They're asking guitar manufacturers to recall their models. to destroy these instruments.

Multiple boutique guitar builders here in the US receive virtually identical legal demands from Fender lawyers, stop making guitars, stop shipping guitars, destroy all your guitars, and send us a bunch of money. And this has blown up back in Fender's face as guitar YouTube, which basically controls all of guitar culture, has had a major backlash saying,

Fender, you have no right to claim this Stratocaster guitar shape, this belongs to all of us. This is a PR disaster that will hurt you and haunt you Fender for years. There's so much musical DNA in that Stratocaster shape that it almost stopped being a guitar design and became the default image of electric guitar itself. For people who don't know, I mean, the Stratocaster guitar shape,

iconic. Literally, the guitar emoji on your telephone is the Fender Stratocaster guitar. When you think electric guitar, you probably picture a Stratocaster. The Fender Stratocaster with its two bullhorns and its shapely ergonomic body, that's what we think of when we think electric guitar. You probably first saw it in the hands of Buddy Holly. David Gilmore. Her. Tomorello

Mark Knopfler The Edge Steve Lacey Buddy Guy Please people Jerry Garcia I think really in many ways The Fender Stratocaster

was made to be interpreted if you will Leo Fender who developed the Stratocaster was really inspired by Ford's manufacturing practices of modular, easy-to-repair guitars. So rather than like gluing on the neck, which you can't take off easily, he decided why don't we bolt the neck on? And basically the entire Fender Stratocaster is built to be modified. So when you picture Jimmy Hendrix, he's playing an upside-down stratocaster.

When you picture Eddie Van Halen. He's ripped out the pickups, put his own pickups in. He has painted the body, made it his own. People are constantly trying to make this guitar their own sound. And so manufacturers, whether boutique or other big guitar makers, have also tried to make S-style, Stratocaster-style guitars, because, again, it is the guitar that people think of when they think the electric, and it's so modifiable. I went to Timu.com for the first time in my life, actually, and they had me put a bunch of, like, deer in the right direction as, like, a human verification thing, very cool website. Yeah. And then I typed in guitar. Yeah.

And guess what came up? a guitar that looks identical, Charlie, to a Fender Stratocaster, and it's $53.49. Surely this is the thing that Fender is worried about, right? Because I'm guessing there is no Fender Stratocaster that costs $53. No. And 49 cents. The Stratocaster was first developed in 1954. Fender didn't start trying to claim its trademark over the body shape until 2003.

They were denied the right to the ownership of that body shape in 2009. Applicant has failed to establish that configurations involved in the applications before us have acquired distinctiveness. The trademark trial and appeal board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that the guitar shape had undergone genericization. Basically, it is now, you know, everybody's shape. This configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in the dictionary. Huh, but all the same, Fender recently said, you know what? We're going to give this another try. So tell us about this recent attempt by this iconic brand to protect its iconic guitar.

So Fender recently had a court ruling in Dosteldorf, Germany. They saw that there was a Chinese company selling fake Stratocasters on Ali Express. If you don't know what Ali Express is, it's like this, like, you know, basically dirt cheap Chinese, you knockoffs of everything under the sun. So they had Stratacasters on there. They ordered one. It was shipped to Germany. So then they were like, okay, they shipped this guitar to Germany. We established that they do ship here.

Fender won a lawsuit by default judgment. They brought a lawsuit against a Chinese Ali Express seller of 60 Europe. Stratt copies, and the Ali-Express seller didn't show up to court. And it was on copyright grounds where they really pitched the idea heavily that the Fender Strat is this artistic piece. This Dissoloff court says that the Stratocaster design qualifies as a copyrighted work of applied art under German and European law. Wow. And using this ruling, Fender says, well, we own this iconic Stratocaster body design shape, which the U.S. court had said, no, you don't.

So Fender turns around and says, great, we own this shape in Germany and the EU. And so they turn around and start issuing these Seasons Assist letters. They say, basically, you got to destroy those guitars and stop selling that. Charlie, dare I ask, why is Fender pursuing this claim in Germany of all places? In any legal case, you're always looking for the court, which is going to side with, you know, your claim. And Germany and European intellectual property law are particularly favorable to product design intellectual property cases. The Europeans definitely do it differently. They make different kinds of decisions than U.S. courts are going to.

And is the argument they're making in this court in Dusseldorf essentially the argument that you said they started making in the early aughts, which is that this is our baby, this is our whole thing, this is our brand and butter, back off the rest of you guitar manufacturers? Yeah, I mean, it's a reasonable claim to make their biggest competitor, Gibbs. has a famous guitar called the Les Paul, and they were given a right to the silhouette of that body that says that only Gibson can make the silhouette of that Les Paul. And so it is reasonable that Fender would say, well, what about our guitar shape?

I mean, frankly, the electric guitar, it doesn't really matter what the shape of the body is. Unlike the acoustic guitar where the body shape really matters, but the electric guitar, you can kind of make it look like anything. That's why you have these crazy V-shaped guitars, or these wild, you know, metal guitars with sharp points all over the place. So, yeah, if Gibson can claim that they own a body shape and they were granted the right to it in 1993,

then Fender, I think, reasonably would pursue the same thing. Okay, you're using words like reasonable, like fair, with regard to what Fender is pursuing in this court in Dusseldorf regarding dupes from China. And yet, the whole reason we're here is because by pursuing this case in Germany, Fender ruffles feathers the world over. Tell us about how that happens. People are upset that Fender has made this aggressive legal claim. Fucking bullshit corporate ass fucks.

This is not the way to do it, Fender. to publicly go after small builders so that you can monopolize the Stratocaster, in my opinion, that's what this reads as. So you won a case in Dusseldorf, cool, I'm glad you won. But to turn that into this letter that is draconian and unfair and turns you into this biggest bully in the world, where did that lead to this? they went after a lot of different manufacturers, not just this one from China. You know, the guitar manufacturing industry, some of it are big players.

Other guitar manufacturers are small boutique companies run by just a couple of people. So I think a lot of guitar fans have felt that, you know, Fender's trying to take something away, not just from the big guys, but also the little ones. Was this inevitable for Fender?

Was this something they had to do to protect their bottom line? I think it's like, it's the predictable corporate act. That's what you're going to do. It's like this is our intellectual property. Don't take it. Even though, you know, I think a lot of musicians would like to believe that, you know, music is meant to be free.

It's meant for everybody. It's for sharing. It's for our deepest emotions. And when art and commerce intersect, things get messy. We're going to talk about the rest of the dupes. And if anything's original anymore when Today Explained is back. Support for Today Explained comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels hands.

hand crafted, but is still fast to ship. Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. Agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections, and you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder, for creators, teams, and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right.

Agents solve the gap between AI-generated ideas and production-ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. It stays on the canvas, stays editable, and can be published when the team is ready. Agents and Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything all in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash explained for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com

slash explained for 30% off. Framer.com slash explained rules and restrictions may apply. Sean Ramosterm, let me ask you a question. Which journalistic endeavors do you pay money to support? Oh my gosh. Which or like how many? Let me think. That one and that one and that one and that one. A bunch of public

radio stations. A big newspaper that I can think of. Some substacks? My gosh. So many newsletters. I don't know if there's substacks, but like I was trying to count the other day because someone asked me and I think That's like six newsletters at least. Dang. Like a lot.

How about you? Are you in the newsletter camp, too? All of that, not so much newsletters. A lot of podcasts on Patreon. Heck yeah. Which reminds me. Oh, yeah. You were like, yes anding me.

Okay. You, dear listener, can support this show today explained and in doing so support Vox, which makes this show possible by going to Vox.com slash members. There's benefits. You get to listen to the show without ads. You get little perks. Check it out. And thank you.

Support for today's blame comes from ShipStation. AI is only as smart as what you put into it. And the breakthroughs, the ones that actually make your life easier, only happen when the AI is built for exactly what you need. ShipStation's AI isn't a general purpose tool. It's specialized and trained on decades of real shipping data and billions of actual orders. Shipstation is an end-to-end order fulfillment platform for e-commerce. Shipstation adapts to your unique business letting you know when stock is low,

recommending the best carrier selections and rates and automating tasks to save you time. Also, you can stay one step ahead. Their features eliminate the need for multiple tools in your workflow, like inventory syncing across your sales channels, a branded returns portal that helps turn returns into revenue, automatic rate shopping, plus integrations with accounting and CRM software. The sooner you switch, the sooner you start saving time and money. Get started with ShipStation Today and get 60 days free at ShipStation.com with code today.

It's shipstation.com code today. Shipstation.com code today taxes and fees applied. Today, Explain, is back with Mia Sato, who's a senior reporter at The Verge and recently wrote about doaps. Mia, I wonder, are we like at peak dupe right now? I think we might be. We could probably surmise that there will be even more doaps in the future. But definitely, I think there are more dupes than have ever existed in the history of mankind right now.

Yeah, exactly. It could get worse, depending on whether you think it's a bad thing to begin with. But we can get into that. Let's talk about dupe culture. I mean, for all the people out there who just buy the name brand product every time, do those people exist? Maybe. What exactly is dupe culture? What has it become?

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. Uh, guitars, right? Clothing. If you want to look expensive, but not spend a lot of money, this is the video for you. Makeup. I'm doing a full face of drugstore dupes that are just as good, if not better than their luxury counterpart. Food.

You've heard of Doritos, Lunchley, and Oreos. But I bet you haven't heard of Dito's, Brunchley, or Boreos. In this video... Recipes. I'm gonna show you guys how to make copycat Outback Steakhouse spinach dip. There are dupes for our Lulu Lemon Pans. I saved $423 by shopping the Amazon Lulu Lumen dupe instead of going to Lulu Limeon. So you know why we're here today?

Lululemon has sued Costco for selling dupes, so we've got to check them out. These ones are $30 and the ones from Lululemon are literally 100 and something. There are dupes for Birken bags, which are incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to purchase designer handbags that go for tens of thousands of dollars, that there was like a $50 version for sale. at Walmart. It was called the Workin. All right, my Wal-Mez. Working is here. This is not just the Workin bag. It is my twerking bag.

There are dupes for fancy pots and pans. There are dupes for lip glosses and lip oils and lip stains. There are dupes for vacations. Someone was marketing a different island as a dupe of Santorini, right? So you can kind of apply this dupe framing to just about anything. What's different now is that dupes are kind of just a way of life in that you don't have to go to somewhere kind of seedy or weird

or, you know, black markety to get a dupe. Anything you can think of, dupe culture means that there's a dupe out there of it somewhere. But it's walking a line, being very careful not to infringe on things like trademark or copyright. And how do you find your dupes? you just go to dupe.com? Doop.com is a thing.

Dupe.com basically you can copy and paste a URL to any product. Wow. 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. The thing is a lot of contemporary, modern online shopping actually has all the tools you need

to find a dupe built into the field. features. So Amazon, for example, just introduced a new feature where you can write out a text version of what you're looking for. I'm looking for a red crop top with ruffle sleeves, 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 product. So it's basically like 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, it's never been easier because a lot of these features are built into the platforms that we're using in the first

place. When you talk about just typing in a URL or copying and pasting a URL more likely into dupe.com or all these reverse image searches, where do we end up on the legality? I mean, that's sort of the million, billion dollar question, which is like, what is a lot? Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but when IP attorneys describe this to me, every, like, every question I would ask them, they're kind of like, it depends. When you get down to something like fashion, one, you know, expert told me that, like, a lot of it is not protectable. This shirt that I'm wearing, right? It's like a button-down shirt with a lace pattern. No one should be able to own that specific thing. Just because of fast fashion company, if they were to rip this off,

like, is there illegal grounds to sue them? Maybe not. Just because two products look the same doesn't necessarily mean that it's illegal. There was a recent case that was kind of, you know, quite influential because it was one of the first dupe cases to my understanding, but the creator of the Ugg boot went after a dupe. So Ugg has been trying to sue Quince for making cheaper dupes that look exactly like the silhoues.

that they claim to be theirs. And the court said to Ugg, I don't care how many you've sold or how well you've branded the silhouette, it's too general for you to claim it as yours. The jury found that the designs were similar, but they invalidated the design patent. And what the jury found was,

yes, the product, the dupe, looked substantially similar to the original UG boot, to the patent, the design patent that UG had, but that the UG patent in the first place maybe should not have been issued, that it wasn't unique enough. And so that's where all of these questions get really muddy, right? Even if you have a design patent for a product, is it like viable? And it could turn people against you, right?

Because I guess people feel like they can rip off Fender because Fender's the biggest fish. And people feel like they can rip off Ugs because for like a decade, it was like the boots to have and it doesn't feel like they're struggling. Is that a part of this like broader dupe culture that may or may not be peaking right now? The public's engagement with dupe culture is endlessly fascinating to me because people have a lot of thoughts. And often the thoughts are around, of course I'm going to buy a dupe of a burkin because I can't afford a $50,000 handbag. And if there's a cheaper alternative, well, I'm just going to buy that. because now, you know, poor people deserve nice things too,

where I shouldn't have to be mega wealthy to afford a bag that I like. And that thinking often colors the dupe discourse. Now that we can't afford to get into more, I think we're romanticizing the idea of dupes because, like, we wouldn't have money to buy the real thing anyway. I did the bullet and I bought these heavy dupes on Amazon. And, you know, 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 consume, which is shop.

And people get really defensive and protective of what they are able to buy and sort of like the morality of dupes. Buying dupes is bad karma. Time has come for us to all collectively stop buying into dupe culture. I saw a video today that a creator posted saying run to Kmart and buy this top, it is a dupe for this with consideration top. With consideration, if you don't know, is a small Australian. business. I want to know why Gen Z care about everything other than counterfeits. The dupe, I sort of think, is never enough. This is my hot take, but I think when you have a dupe, you still lust over the product it's duping. And in that way, it's actually making them

even more aspirational. I think that modern online shopping has kind of lied to consumers and almost like rewired our brains to make us think that there is such a thing that costs $5 and will last a really long time and is ethically made and looks good. And I think often that is not the case. And often that's what dupes are, right? They kind of give you the illusion of finding something nice or finding something beautiful or something that you feel, you know, you identify with. But when you strip away a lot of it, it's a lie. You kind of, you get what you pay for. And the cost of things has gone down so much, especially since like, you know, Timo and Sheehan, these ultra-fast fashion brands, that I think consumers have kind of forgotten what is literally possible when it comes to like cheap and good products. I think cheap and good products do still exist, but not to the extent that we would like to believe.

How did you think when you're writing your piece, Mia, about where the internet has taken the idea of, of originality. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think our current recommendation algorithm-driven feeds really make it so that copying someone or recreating something is not just easier, but it actually sometimes makes more sense. Like, think about the way that trends circulate, right? The platforms encourage us to use the same sounds as other people, do the same dances, edit in the same way, pick up on the same formats. They want dupes of the content. What I was interested in when I was writing this piece was like, I found that the textures of the internet, the endless copies and the sort of similar but different creators and the little niches were recreating themselves in our

physical world, like in the things that we surround ourselves with. Like, I would be surprised if you went home and looked around your house and you probably have a dupe of something. I have doaps of stuff in my house that I didn't even know we're dupes. So, you know, they're all over. And sometimes you buy a dupe without even realizing it. Mia Sato writes for The Verge, accepts no substitutes. Peter Ballin-on-Rosen produced the show today. Jolie Myers and Amina Al-Assad he edited.

Patrick Boyd and David Tattashore mixed. Gabriel Dunatav made sure nothing was fake. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's today explained.