Siphoning Gas From Your Bottom Line

Permalink 12/13/04  

What if you could get in on the super-hot ground floor of a booming new retail product. For a small upfront investment, you'll get a full line of items to sell through your store or supermarket kiosk for huge profits. And the best part is, the prices are so low compared to competitors, the product practically moves itself off the shelves. The only problem is, you'd better watch your back for customs workers. This amazing money maker isn't sketchy diet pills, or pirate DVDs. The new pusher's choice is pirate toys, and the market is way bigger than you might think.
Pirated Nintendo

You've all seen those cool new plug-n-play versions of classic console games like pacman and space invaders. Some even include 20 or even 50 games in once console. But, despite all the wild success of these games, Nintendo has still been slow to release their titles.

And with good reason: while not a lot of people would buy a "just pong" console game for their TV, there are plenty of people who would shell out for only the 3 Mario Brothers games in a little controller. Nintendo's playing it smart and holding on to their intellectual property the same way they did with the releases they made for the SNES when it first came out

So, you can imagine our surprise last week when we saw a kiosk at a mall in Princeton, New Jersey selling a plug-n-play with not one, not three, but over 80 games on it. And these weren't off label deadbeats; all the marios, excitebike, 1942, metroid, zelda, and even Aladdin and some other Disney-Nintendo partnerships were packed into this one cartridge. It even looked like the games were ripped straight from the original roms; not even cosmetically altered to try to get around copyrights.

On top of all that, the same kiosk also had some copies of last season's Mattel RC cars that looked like they were made from the same molds (or really similar)

We were so freaked out by the whole thing (this was a real rent-paying kiosk, not a van outside a concert) that we went straight to the web and checked out if this was a common thing. And call us naive as hell, but it looks like an epidemic!

We knew that roms, the software component of the Nintendo systems, were being traded pretty freely around the web. But the amount of counterfeit hardware is astonishing. Some web citizens have made a hobby of collecting the stuff, and the sheer volume of available systems is unbelievable. We especially like the ones that use one controller from a playstation and one from a N64, or a gun mold from WOW's Lasertag, or even look like an X-Box. Or, there's always the ones that try to rip off a popular phrase like "Star Trek".

Not that the problem is restricted to video game consoles; severe losses happen every year in every product group which is even mildly fashion-oriented. Famously, perfumes and handbags have been sold in this way. But recently, with lowered import barriers in Europe and North America, there have been large amounts of counterfeit toys and consumer electronics as well. The Toy Industries of Europe have published this report on the problem, and there are quite a few newspaper articles around the web for more information.

So what can you do? Well, don't buy the stuff for starters. It's definitely cheap, but it's ultimately total crap, and probably won't last long enough to be worth the plastic it was molded from. But, as designers, there are other things you can do to protect your products and your brands that you've worked so hard to build. Packaging Digest has some packaging tips to avoid being overtly copied. Also, a good relationship with a reputable manufacturer overseas is absolutely necessary. As you can see from these "Newtendo" pictures, even the packaging might have been sourced from the original factory (sometimes laborers run the machines at night, or on breaks and sell the unrecorded parts for a little extra cash). The best method of all, though, is simply to re-convince consumers that low-price, low-quality is not the best choice. Unfortunately, this last option isn't the easiest thing in the world.

With more products joining this category of cost and appearance driven design, and the increasing ease with which China can produce products, these problems will only grow. In order for us to preserve our livelyhoods and our abilities to place products in the market, we will have to find ways to thwart these thieves.

Just think of it as another facet of the design problem. We're up to the challenge.
PermalinkPermalink • 13 comments
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