

To learn how to report through PayPal, please click here to view their instructions. If you have purchased a knock off, your best course of action is to report the charge as fraudulent directly to your credit card company or PayPal (however you made the purchase). Any listings on these sites are selling counterfeit puzzles and we working hard to have all listings taken down. Our puzzles are NOT available on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Wish, Alibaba, AliExpress, Taobao, or Tmall.
#Knock offs full#
You can see a full list of retailers here. Our puzzles are only available in our online store, our new storefront in Hamilton, ON and through our authorized retailers. Please know that we are doing the best that we can to keep our customers safe. We have been working hard to have all the infringing sites removed, but it has definitely been an uphill battle. We have included some images here of the worst ones we have seen and some detailed information below. We have seen several different versions, and some are more convincing than others. It is also about whose hands cramped for the elegance I assert.Starting in April 2020, dozens of websites popped up using our product images to sell some very poorly made knock offs of our Moon and Earth puzzles. Where I am situated in the world is determined by more than the fact of my race, gender, and class, my education and employment. But the artifacts I carry also carry the condition of others. I adorn my body to satisfy my aesthetic sensibilities and also as a kind of armor in an unfair world. And culture and image are palimpsestic, rife with meanings far beyond what appears on the surface. People exist in what Patricia Hill Collins described as matrices of domination. This is why there are generations of social theorists who have struggled mightily with how we think about consumption and culture as a part of the political economy. There are exploiter s, plural, who exist in a complex network with one another, often unawares. There are rarely simple binaries of exploiter and exploited. In Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (introduction at link), I wrote about how domination is layered.


In an article that at first blush seemed to undermine the way luxury labels are fetishized (ostensibly a good thing) there was a glaring omission: asking what the cost of counterfeiting is at the bottom rung. But in underground markets that are completely unregulated, workers are most vulnerable to mistreatment. If you shop in Italy, the knock-offs sold on the street, often by Africans, are of remarkably good quality and are often made by the same people as the originals. There isn’t a clean line between legitimate and illegitimate labor. The statement is alarming to read, but it’s a sign of how brutal the work of making leather goods can be. In 2021, Gucci made a public statement against modern slavery and human trafficking as a response to unethical labor practices in the designer world. That is not to suggest that working in designer leather factories is ever fairly compensated-luxury is almost always dependent upon some exploitation of those who do its labor-but there are degrees. One of the arguments against knock-off designer bags is that they are often made under horrific and even violent labor conditions.

But reading about these bags immediately made me think about people whom the article doesn’t consider: those who make them. They are less expensive than the real items, so they’re arguably good investments there is value in the cost and in the price creep that happens as more people buy them. So one wonders why wealthy women who have the resources would buy the knock-offs.īut luxury consumer culture is driven more by exclusivity than by quality, and the highest-quality knock-offs are apparently exclusive and elusive. Knock-offs are usually purchased by people who aspire to the status image of the wealthy without having the wealth. The trend surprised me: Authenticity has long been a status symbol when it comes to luxury items. Last week, a friend sent me an article about wealthy women who purchase high-quality counterfeit luxury bags.
