this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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I mean, how often do you see the same damn item from China with a different logo? I bought a cheap cylinder projector for my daughter and I swear the same damn thing came up under 20 different names. I ended up just getting the one with the upgraded speaker.
China has a huge counterfeit industry, and amazon is complicit in helping them out with it. https://daxueconsulting.com/counterfeit-products-in-china/ https://www.marketingscoop.com/consumer/amazon-fake-products-policy/
Basically, anyone wanting to make anything has two options for manufacturing; in house, and in china. In house is way more expensive, and much less likely to result in profits. In china is incredibly easy and much cheaper, but as soon as you ask for them to pause making your product, they turn around and rebrand it and sell it for much cheaper everywhere they can (Temu, amazon, etc).
Another part is that a lot of manufacturing companies don't speak English, so there is a whole industry of people who know Chinese manufacturers who will sell their translation and industry contact services. Super helpful when you have a good relationship with them, but the instant that turns even slightly sour, you discover the major downside of having a middleman between you and your product tooling: you have absolutely no power to stop anyone in china from using your tooling to make cheap knockoffs of your product, legal or otherwise.
But also the ODM industry is massive too in China - manufacturers who design and make products, but don't sell directly, rather they contract it out to an "empty brand" (i.e. a company that's brand only, no real assets or manufacturing capacity), stamp the brand logo on the product and sell it to them en masse.
This is usually why you'd see the exact same cheap thing under many brands.
Counterfeiting is also a thing but those companies usually have good(ish) engineering, and aim to properly replicate expensive products, such as Apple AirPods (the AirReps community is pretty big, and you can buy AirPods Pro 2 clones that are 90-95% of the official one, for around £40-50).