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D2C Airjitsu Temple outrage!
Coolguy5000
Member Posts: 1,588
They have cloned a D2C set. Come on LEGO Act Now! 0
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Comments
However, D2C isn't the most important bit; NINJAGO is a registered trademark.
But there are plenty of other costs that can be reduced, which is why TLG opened their own plant in China. And what do you think their customer service is like?
100% for TLG, including profit, versus 60% for the clone, but excluding profit.
You can't just knock off TLG's profit and say that's a reason why the clone manufacturer can sell more cheaply, because they have to make a profit too.
#Oops
#AlreadyHappens
#Lego
Wooly ideas about brand loyalty only go so far, although for the moment I think a lot of people cling to the idea that things will improve.
*runs away before being attacked by loyal Lego fans
Buy clone sets in the Chinese market. Part them out. Then set up web site so that people can CloneLink the sets cheaply and without too much criticism because they're not actually buying copied sets.
TLG is like many companies who accept the risk when it dealing with manufacturing products and Intellectual Property rights....it's all about profit margin. They will turn a blind eye to the counterfeiting due to making more profit since they don't have to pay a higher salary cost and follow environmental laws within their own country.
On that basis, criticising TLG is a bit pointless if there's actually nothing they can do.
Sold!
There's plenty that TLG can do to stop the increase or end counterfeiting their product. First thing, stop outsourcing!!
Do you think the Chinese are stupid? That they in any way need TLG knowledge or skill? That's an extremely naive view. Given their propensity to copy things, and their generally free access to it, do you think there is anything that they need that they haven't already copied? And improved?
As for moulds, do you really think that because they are physically within China, that it means that they can just walk out of the factory within anybody noticing? You're not talking of one or two either; you're talking about ALL of them - including any which are currently in production and which take hours to change.
Piece designs are a different matter; that's the hard bit to get right. Of course, they're all available virtually anywhere in the world - in toy shops. Put them in a laser scanner and they know precisely what they have to replicate.
You might have just reason to complain about quality, but that's essentially because they have different priorities, not because of their technical abilities.
If anybody got their hands on one, I would be very interested to see what the quality is actually like, as I have got the original about which I can't say anything bad quality-wise. Otoh I never had quality issues with any original Lego piece.
P.S.: I know, no one should buy this thing to not encourage them to produce any more of that bootleg stuff.
The real problem TLG has though is legal wheels take years to turn, but clone manufacturers can adapt in weeks. Likely they'll be able to get something done about this, but by the time they do it probably wont matter much for this particular set though they may be able to obtain financial compensation and create a deterrent for such future abuse though it ultimately depends on how much of an award they're able to obtain.
And once again, for anyone tempted by this, let me remind you that this is an illegal counterfeit, and as such it can be seized by your nation's authorities, so in buying this you could potentially find it taken away from you with no compensation - that would be for you to try and pursue from the seller. People will often see that as a risk worth taking on a $5 minifigure, but as the counterfeits get increasingly more intricate and increasingly grow in value, you may start to find yourself at the wrong end of the risk equation at some point. It's a case of buyer beware.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/952354.shtml
Piracy / fake goods / whatever you want to call it is part of Chinese culture. It will take many many years to eradicate it.
Yes. It is very rare for anything to be available only inside China. The Chinese government subsidise exports through low postage costs. So while they may not be available in TRU or Walmart, they are easy to purchase online. It's possible to buy a knock off figure from China and get it delivered half way around the world (~60p for the figure and postage and packing) for less than it is to post a genuine one within the UK (~74p for postage alone, without considering packaging and not including the figure). A large UK company might have bulk discounts and get the postage price a little lower, but they still cannot compete on price. The only thing they can compete on is speed. Which is why UK sellers can import boxes of fakes from China, then resell them on ebay and buyers pay significantly more for the knock-offs than they would buying direct from China.
Brick comparison:
But they aren't the only ones ..
Personally I wouldn't waste any of my cash on these fakes.
I mean I have bought stuff from Best-Lock (once, to try them out, never ever again) and MegaBloks (the Build-a-Minion which I actually find quite good) but both were their original designs and no Lego clones. And both were not that much cheaper than real Lego. MegaBloks over here has about the same average price per piece as Lego themselves.
So how can that "Lepin" ToA copy be 120$ or (as scoiltreasa said) later probably even 35 to 40$, while the photos seem to indicate at least very decent quality. Everything seems to fit together well, the color of the bricks looks very much like the original (in contrast to Best-Lock and others where colors look very washed out and fit and finish is awful). I can't wrap my head around it.
I too have a MegaBloks model, the PoC Black Pearl, and I find the quality awful. I don't think my fingers have ever hurt as much as they did after putting the 140 pieces together for that model. Then upon trying to dismantel one piece even broke, the plastic is just wrong and feels cheap.
I will not post the link to the site, but here is a screengrab - it could be that some of these prices are for a minimum purchase of say 200 units or more though:
And yes, I also agree with @cheshirecat . The fake-market would have been blatantly clear to Lego before they decided to move their production to China.
There are also rumors that other Lego Copy Firms will also clone the same product (such as SY and Lele for example).
Think this 'baby warg' (replacing the husky) is my favourite part of that Master-Wu-Dragon knock-off.
The clones would've happened anyway, whether production moved to China or not. Somebody else's product's might've been targeted first, but that's about it. The western press make it clear that it's high-value and common sense says that it's reasonably cheap to produce. Sold to the Chinese gentleman at the back!
I'd be more worried about another aspect of Chinese production that seems to affect some other products - that genuine LEGO parts continue to made to the same standards.
And as for the price they can sell at... they have to do no research, design or advertising themselves. This is the vast majority of what any company spends money on. Plastic, on the other hand, is cheap.
It's very easy for these counterfeiters to sell something like this for 25-50% of the price of the original and still make a profit, because production costs are virtually nothing to begin with. They are a mere fraction of the $200 LEGO charges - which is mostly profit. Even on the cost side, marketing, design, and distribution costs LEGO more than the actual production and materials costs. The counterfeiters can avoid almost all those non-material costs AND save on the materials and production side too. Of course there is a ton of profit to be had
There really is no mystery here on this point, which is why it's amusing to me to see people seemingly bewildered that there is profit to be had at half the price.
I suspect Lego is rarely, if ever sold at a loss. It has high perceived brand value, and that allows for massive profits in much the same way many fashion chains and Apple can price things. People rarely seem to realise that their £40 Armani t-shirts and so on are made in the exact same sweatshops with the exact same materials and with the exact same effort and hence cost put into design as for a cheap £3 t-shirt from Primark. There's nothing magical about TLG's products, they benefit from incredibly cheap outsourced manufacturing as much as the next product does.
I've owned numerous knockoff items over the years from toys to electronics to scooters. The problem is that the engineers hired by the Chinese firms are just copying the existing items. They don't always understand why a part is made out of a particular material or made to a precise size (which they have only measured and sometimes guessed the material).
I used to work for a company that had factories in China. We designed high end electronics. When we would send our prototypes to our reps in China to start the manufacturing process, we had to encrypt our code on our chips and burn/scrape off all the chip identifiers, etc. Even though we took those measures our stuff would STILL get cloned before our products hit the market. But if you bought one of the knockoffs and compared it to ours, the code would be different, the chips would be different, the capacitors would be slightly off, etc.
I have tons of stories about Chinese knockoff items and their companies stealing intellectual property. Opening a factory in China opens up the door to allow other companies (with the help of government officials, etc) to get their hands on pictures/measurements/designs/etc that they would not have been able to get their hands on outside of China. Depending on what you manufacture you have to provide the government with documentation of what you are making. If you hand the info to a corrupt person, your info is on the open market.
This is from first hand experience with dealing with companies in China. TLG should have known better.
There is nothing mystical about injection moulding. High quality machines are available to all comers prepared to pay for one. TLG don't make a secret of whose machines they use.
The prototypes are available in any good toy shop.
Indeed, I don't imagine that the factory in Jiaxing is capable of producing something like the Temple yet, not from scratch. It only has a fraction of the final workforce and is still a couple of years from completion, so it is probably just packing parts made elsewhere, not moulding much - if anything. You need a full set of presses to actually make a set of any size, simply because the downtime changing moulds is significant.
You could just as well argue it is in line with the popularity of lego increasing (probably a much bigger driving force). I simply fail to see why the counterfeiters would wait for a factory to open when the sets are freely available to them. If we were seeing fakes before release I would agree something was up, after all the factories would be producing sets long before release. But as it stands your argument suggests that we could stop illegal counterfeiting almost completely simply by not having factories in China. Plenty of brands can act of as examples of that being false.
OK, keep your hair on, I'm not blaming them! But the rise of the resellers is a symptom of the same thing.
Or is somebody going to concoct a story that revolves around the "evil Chinese" being the same as the "evil resellers"? They're obviously connected, because it can't be a coincidence that the rise in resellers has occurred at the same time as rise of the clones.
Currently, the LEGO Group's Chinese plant isn't even complete. There is one company in China that is under contract from the LEGO Group to produce parts on their behalf, and even so the parts being produced at these facilities are mostly limited to CMFs, promotional figs, and certain specialized parts like minifigure legs with side-printing. Not nearly enough bricks to produce a set like the Temple of Airjitzu.
The fact is, as LEGO gets bigger, there's more of a market for LEGO products, and especially in low-income areas, more of a market for cheap imitation LEGO. The real reason you see knock-offs of sets like this is that sets like this are wildly popular (Ninjago in particular is extremely popular in Asia), and that makes them a magnet for knock-offs regardless of where they're being produced. It's unfortunate, but there is literally nothing the LEGO Group can do to prevent it. Just report these to LEGO when you see them and they'll try their best to control the damage.