Counterfeit Goes Cool: High-End Brands Urged To Embrace Rise Of #Dupe
High-end brands should “lean in” and embrace the #dupe subculture that feeds off recommending duplicates or cheaper alternatives to luxury products, social media experts have advised.
Dupes, knockoffs and brand imitators are not new: the first wave of beauty YouTubers were highlighting cheaper products as far back as 2010. But in the past, buying imitation goods was mostly done with the aim of passing the item off as the real thing.
The difference now is that buying #dupe is no longer the same as duping or being duped. With the rapid rise of shareable short-form video platforms, counterfeit has gone cool, with generation Z openly finding and flaunting their dupes.
“The rise of dupe culture speaks to a generational shift in consumption of goods and media,” said Jennifer Baker, the growth marketing leader at Grin, a creator management platform.
“Previous generations may have shopped for knockoffs on the sly, but gen Z has not only normalised buying knockoffs or generic products but has grown the #dupe movement into one of the most searched terms on social media.”
The change is so profound that research shows that even when gen Z or millennials can afford to buy a genuine designer item, many still opt for a dupe instead: nearly one-third of US adults said they intentionally bought a dupe of a premium or luxury product, with at least 11% of UK consumers buying one dupe product at least once every few months.
Half say they buy dupes for the savings, while 17% say even if they could afford the genuine article, dupes are a great alternative.
Insiders say dupe culture looks likely to become a permanent part of young shoppers’ habits, with “dupe discourse” permeating every online medium, from YouTube and Instagram to digital magazine listicles and blogs.
Most consistently tagged are items appealing to younger women – the internet’s heaviest users – including clothing brands Lululemon leggings, Skims shapewear, Bottega Veneta, Ugg, Charlotte Tilbury foundation, Adidas Sambas, Dior, Olaplex and Dyson.
So popular is the trend that TikTok videos with the #dupe hashtag have racked up nearly 6bn views to date. Playful variations of the phrase, such as #doop or #doupe, account for hundreds of millions more: type “I found the perfect dupe” into TikTok and watch the hundreds of thousands of videos pop up.
