The Rise and Fall of Original Creators and Who Survives the Dupe Economy
Updated: 4 days ago
There was a time when searching for a Cordina Hair product online turned up copies wherever you looked. Copies of the patented Flower Curl® and Waver Bun® appeared on numerous platforms, many of them using the company’s own photos to sell themselves. For founder Yanika Cordina, who invented both tools and prototyped them in a garden shed, it was one of the most overwhelming parts of building a product-based business.
“Dupes and copies were everywhere,” she says. “You’d type in the product and there they were. It was really overwhelming.”
Social media is brilliant at spreading the word about a new, original product. The trouble is that it shows that product to everyone, including the people who would rather copy an idea than come up with one of their own. The same video that introduces an invention to a million potential customers also introduces it to every copycat watching, and before long the copies are on sale all over the world.
“Social media is amazing for awareness, but it’s the same platform that shows your product to the copycats,” Yanika says. “It spreads the dupes just as fast as it spreads the original.”
The real cost of a cheap copy
It isn’t only the products that get taken. Cordina Hair’s photos and videos have been stolen time and time again, edited to fit someone else’s brand and passed off as their own, so shoppers end up looking at the company’s work while buying somebody else’s copy.
“A dupe is always going to be cheaper, because it’s made cheaply,” Yanika says. “It’s never going to be the same as the original, and it’s never going to perform like the original.”
It’s a deal where nobody wins except the copier, and even they only get to win once.
The customer ends up with something that doesn’t work and the dupe goes in the bin, they are also now out of pocket and may end up spending even more to get the right product second time round, whilst the planet gets more waste.
When action isn’t taken, the copies don’t just take sales either. They crowd the original out of search results until customers can’t find it at all, which is exactly what is happening to small businesses and original creators everywhere.
“If we hadn’t taken action, the dupes would have taken over,” Yanika says.
When the copy turns up on the high street
The copies don’t only appear online. Cordina Hair first heard about dupes in TK Maxx when a customer spotted them in store and sent the company a photo. It’s one of the quieter rewards of building a brand people trust, because customers and followers message you directly when they see something not quite right and try to help. Yanika went in to see for herself, photographed the copies and bought a couple, which turned out to be so poorly made and designed that they were unusable.
It’s a strange kind of compliment to find a copy of your invention in a well-known shop, and a sad one too.
“It’s sad that we live in a world where people have the drive to run a business but not the creativity to come up with their own ideas,” Yanika says. “So they take someone else’s instead and make a quick buck on the back of somebody else’s success.”
“Big retailers have big budgets, and they have the resources to check where their products come from and to work with original creators directly,” she says. “A company with good values will always want to work with the original creator.”
“But I’ve definitely seen a trend of big companies wanting to jump on a unique product with a clear advantage, and instead of working with the person who created it, they go out of their way to copy it to protect their margins,” Yanika says. “The truth is, big companies are now competing with small businesses too, and when the only way to win customers is on margin, they’ll do whatever it takes. It’s the small creators who pay for it.”
Copycats come in all sizes
It isn’t only big retailers and bargain platforms. Some of the boldest copies come from solo founders hoping to cash in on someone else’s success, and in many ways they’re the hardest to deal with.
In one case, a copycat built an entire website and shop around Cordina Hair’s patented design, complete with their own content, and claimed to have plenty of stock ready to sell. When the shop was reported, the owner could hardly believe the position they were in. The stock had to be binned and the selling stopped completely.
“Solo copycats are probably the worst to deal with, because there’s so much more emotion on their side,” Yanika says. “They’re usually working alone or with a partner, so a lot of effort goes into the website, the branding and the imagery before they’ve even spent money on stock. It takes a lot of hard work to build a brand and a website, and I know, because I’ve done it all myself. When the infringement catches up with them, all that time, money and effort is gone overnight, on something that was never theirs to begin with.”
Yanika has dealt with numerous solo copycats over the years, and the pattern is almost always the same. Most end up pleading with her or trying to justify the copy, which simply can’t be justified when the product is protected by law.
“I’d say most of them know exactly what they’re doing,” she says. “Often they have a history of copying products and a list of businesses they’ve tried before.”
It’s an expensive way to learn the difference between inspiration and imitation.
“I’d encourage those solo entrepreneurs to find their own creativity,” she says. “Inspiration and copying are two completely separate things, and copying someone else is never going to end well.”
“Inspiration and copying are two completely separate things.”
Why so many founders give up
Protecting an idea properly isn’t cheap. Cordina Hair has spent thousands of pounds on patents, design patents and trademarks in countries including the UK, the US, the EU and China. It’s the reason many small businesses never go down the IP route at all, and even with that protection in place, the work is far from over.
The company has now removed more than 2,200 infringements, with more taken down every week, across Amazon, Temu, AliExpress, Alibaba, TikTok Shop, Instagram and a long list of smaller copycat businesses.
“Every platform has its own way of reporting and taking things down, so you’re learning a new system every time,” Yanika says. “I completely understand why so many founders don’t take action. It’s time-consuming and it’s overwhelming.”
It’s a burden that’s emotional as well as practical.
“Having your work copied is truly awful,” Yanika says. “The first time it happens, you’re appalled. But the more it happens, the more you get used to it, and you start dealing with the infringements and copies far more effectively, with much less emotion attached.”
Meanwhile, platforms such as Shein and Temu, built on selling products for a few pounds, have made cheap copies easier to buy than ever. The impact on small businesses has been devastating, and many are quietly deciding it simply isn’t worth carrying on.
“There should be more help from government to protect small businesses,” Yanika says. “We’ve been left to it, with no help whatsoever.”
“Having your work copied is truly awful.”
Surviving the dupe economy
So who survives? Not the copiers, whose cheap imitations end up in the bin, and not always the original creators either, because a good idea on its own protects nothing. The creators who come through are the ones who build a wall of proof and protection around their work before the copies arrive.
That starts with patents and trademarks, wherever it’s possible to get them. For Cordina Hair, they’ve made every one of those 2,200 takedowns possible.
“I’m so glad I protected my inventions,” Yanika says. “The patents and all of our media and press timestamps have allowed us to take down all these infringements and copies of our work.”
A strong brand matters just as much. The Flower Curl® and Waver Bun® are so unique that the tools themselves became automatically associated with Cordina Hair, which makes a copy far easier to spot for what it is.
Acting quickly matters too, because reporting stolen work the minute you see it stops a copy from settling in and spreading, even if the result isn’t always instant.
“Taking down copied work is time-consuming,” Yanika says. “Some come down quickly, and others have a ticking time bomb on them and eventually disappear. You’ve got to be patient, but action is key.”
Then there’s the paper trail. Press coverage, awards and media appearances all carry a date, and those dates prove who was there first, long before any copycat started reselling the idea as their own.
Shortly after launching, Yanika pitched her patented hair tools on Dragons’ Den. Since then, the company has won awards, gathered more than 110 million organic views on social media and earned press and media features at home and overseas, while top beauty creators and celebrities bought the products and shared them with their audiences. Dragons, it turns out, make excellent witnesses.
“I never paid for press. Every feature came organically, and that’s important,” Yanika says. “It’s all proof behind your brand, and it’s something any founder can work towards.”
Even so, none of it is a force field.
“You would think having all of that would protect my products, and yet copycats are still busy copying them and selling them illegally,” she says. “It’s going to happen either way. But the more proof and the more protection you have behind you, the easier it is to fight the dupes and copies.”
Her advice to shoppers is simple: check who is selling the product. A quick Google search on the company’s name will soon tell you whether it has press and media coverage behind it, how long it has been trading and what customers say in public reviews.
Platforms known for dupes and for selling products for a few pounds are a huge red flag. Infringers will go as far as copying every single word and using the original’s exact images and content, which can make it hard to tell what’s real, so that’s the moment to start asking questions about the website and the company behind it.
The original might cost a little more, but it’s the one that was designed to work and built to last.
