What's the most frustrating thing a furniture designer will have to endure? The pitch meetings? Production challenges? Supply-chain hassles? We're going to say knock-offs. Because their presence means that after you've endured all of the initial hassles and successfully brought your product to market, someone else swoops in and starts illegally capitalizing on your hard work.
The Danish furniture design fixture Republic of Fritz Hansen is no stranger to piracy victimhood, with countless knock-offs of their iconic Series 7 chair populating cafes and undiscriminating households worldwide. With international legal battles difficult to pursue, the company has taken matters into their own hands via the social media route, releasing this YouTube video showing an impromptu strength test:
The original Series 7, as Arne Jacobsen originally designed it, seems quite a bit stronger. Taking a look at the attention lavished on its construction provides clues as to why.
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Comments
would you buy a fake BMW?
thanks
To the argument that IKEA has not been copied... are you kidding me!? Have you seen the issues IKEA are having in China. Entire stores and the products in them are being replicated right down to logos, trolleys and shopping experiences. Your inability to see beyond your naive designer (prob fake) spectacles, young man, is astounding.
You have to place value in something at some point or nothing will ever matter.
If the chair will withstand that, it'll live through fatty putting his feet up.
The video exactly shows: What you see is what you get.
Go classics!
If the originals were't so bloody expensive this wouldn't happen, no one rips off IKEA furniture. As as many enemies as it has, i've yet to break a piece, and its all durable and (mostly) good looking decent stuff.
If the classics were as efficiently and cost-effectively made this would be a moot point.
Arne Jacobsen has been dead for ages and thus for a long time has not had to endure anything. Yet a private corporation, Fritz Hansen, manages to retain a - fortunately less and less perfect - monopoly on his design - in flagrant disregard of every modernistic vision of democratic design...
I say go you Asian copy cats!
-and remember to add a few extra layers so we can catapult the neat FH designer in a more helpful direction