Your anti-dupe manual.
Fashion calls it out. Beauty calls it out. Even homeware has dupe drama.
But branding? Silent. As if it’s not happening.
Time to rip the band-aid: we’re in the era of copy-paste capitalism.
Branding has a dupe problem, and it’s getting harder to ignore.
You’ve seen it: a brand that looks exactly like another.
Same beige-on-beige palette.
Same smiling lifestyle stock shots.
Same generic sans-serif typography.
Same “Our mission is to empower X to Y” tagline (just tweaked enough to dodge plagiarism).
It’s the “Canva-fication” of culture. Where inspiration became imitation, and imitation became a business model.
Now imitation moves quicker than new ideas can form, letting copying outpace creating and execution outrun originality. Dupe brands aren’t just surviving. They’re winning.
Why Dupes Are Winning (For Now)
The barriers to imitation? Gone. The barriers to originality? Everest-level.
Technology walls have been knocked down.
Design is democratised.
Branding secrets are out in the open.
Consumers are complicit. 71% of Gen Z and 67% of Millennials choose dupes for value (Source: ASG), leaving innovators exposed to knockoffs that undercut them.
Basically, anyone with Wi-Fi, AI, and three Pinterest boards can now launch a “brand” before breakfast:
ChatGPT writes the mission.
Canva files handle the aesthetics.
YouTube teaches one strategy.
Instagram templates do the storytelling.
Shopify plugins build the shopfront in a click.
Scroll. Drag. Drop. Publish. Voilà — a “brand.”
The punchline? You create. You experiment. You innovate. They duplicate. You pay. They profit.
The Cost of Being First
Being first used to be noble. Now it’s risky.
The days, weeks, months, even years poured into building a brand, from concept to campaign, can be copied almost overnight. Literally.
The consequence? Original brands get lost in a marketplace of interchangeable competitors.
On TikTok, a $25 Kmart Oxford shirt that mirrors Dissh’s $139.99 version wasn’t criticised, it was celebrated (Source: AFR). And it doesn’t stop there: Aldi’s prebiotic soda Popz, a clear dupe of the brand Poppi, has even become the preferred choice for some shoppers. (Source: Tastingtable). It’s proof that value for less has overtaken the prestige of the original.
For brands, this is a flashing warning sign: when value outweighs originality, brand equity erodes. Differentiation dies. Homogenisation spreads. And in the age of AI, when copycats move faster than innovators, originality — the very thing brands were built on — has become the rarest commodity.
Originality in the Age of AI
But here’s the twist: AI won’t kill originality. It will make it rarer, and more valuable.
When the market is flooded with near-identical outputs, the stuff that actually cuts through is what only you can do. Real originality is the uncomfortable choice:
An unpopular opinion said out loud.
A subculture decoded from the inside.
A story so specific it couldn’t have been scraped from a dataset.
A joke so niche it only lands with your people.
A creative leap that makes zero sense until suddenly it does.
A thing that isn’t trending — yet.
Originality isn’t just an aesthetic. It’s the attitude. It’s a point of view. It’s a risk.
Today, originality isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s survival. The line between replaceable and irreplaceable brands.
Ready to build a brand they can’t dupe?
Continue reading on our Substack, Public Opinion.
