Nobody tell Morris that the fashion world, just like tech, is built on the unsavory tactic. “There are no rules anymore - if you build a product that works, Amazon or Facebook will copy it,” he wrote on Twitter. They suck.” It’s not clear whether Daniel from Santa Cruz, California purchased the shoes, but he apparently does not think highly of them or Amazon’s shameless copying behavior.īut does it really matter if the shoe is nice, comfortable, and cheaper than Allbirds? To people like Tinder’s Morris, it does indeed. Those customers get free products and are encouraged to write reviews about them, although they’re contractually obligated to disclose that.Įvery single one of the 23 positively glowing reviews of Amazon’s Allbirds clone are from Vine users, save the most recent one earlier this month. Each one appears to have been written by an Amazon Vine user, which are people Amazon invites into its exclusive program based on their reviewing history. Somewhat more perplexing are the reviews. To spur our wider audience to action, I planned to email our 425,000 email subscribers with an explanation. If the issue wasn’t resolved by the second day, I was ready to buckle down and escalate my approach to the issue. That said, the shoe looks nice and it’s $45, which is less than half the price of your standard pair of Allbirds. Listen to the show to discover why it’s important to join Facebook groups for your industry.

Once again, here is the company’s new 206 Collective shoe side by side with an Allbirds one:

It’s important to mention that this behavior has landed Amazon in hot water with regulatory agencies, specifically in the EU, where the company is under investigation for using sales data from third-party sellers to develop and sell similar products of its own. Amazon has gone on a private label spree over the past few years, and it now sells its own products across dozens of categories and under various names entirely unassociated with the Amazon brand. Now, Amazon, through its in-house private label brand 206 Collective, has jumped on the Allbirds cloning bandwagon. If you search “Allbirds” on Amazon right now, you’ll find a wide variety of clones for sale. In that case, the result was a settled lawsuit over trademark infringement. In fact, Allbirds has gone to great lengths to defend itself against such copycats, including famous fashion designer Steve Madden. (The secret was making a nice shoe wrapped in an inoffensive design, simple colors and a modest price tag, and slapping the phrase “merino wool” onto it.)īut less has been written about the army of copycats that have since cloned the Allbirds design and peddled their knockoffs online at lower prices. Much has been written about how Allbirds, a Warby Parker-style effort to simplify a traditionally involved purchase into something thoughtless and utilitarian, was able to take over the fashion-adverse tech industry. There are no rules anymore - if you build a product that works, Amazon or Facebook will copy it. We have reached 'peak cloning' in Silicon Valley.

Your facebook was no clone