I know the title is overly dramatic, but this situation was definitely disappointing considering I am a tiny little niche shop, and normally this kind of stuff happens to larger shops out there, ones with at least 50k followers on Instagram etc.

Long story short: I was chatting with a friend the other day about products and how it’s difficult to make new products online without them being quickly stolen, and I explained why that’s part of why I like my shop being small, quiet, and niche so that I can fly under the radar for now and not deal with the chaotic “viral stress” that comes with blowing up.

I also brought up how as soon as I put my Think Twice Dice on Etsy, copycats started showing up on there (because all the dice makers were being shown my product on their dashboards, too). I searched my dice up on Google to show him and…

My dice were ON TEMU!? Excuse me what?

And not just a “similar” copy cat (I can’t stop people from making similar dice) – but this was literally my exact product design.

So as you have seen in my previous blog entries, I’ve dealt with 5 dice manufacturers so far because I keep trying to improve my dice over time. Based on the Temu photos, I can tell it’s one of 2 manufacturers I’ve used where we created the resin molds of my design (and I can probably narrow it down to which one if I do the detective work). I’m guessing the manufacturer decided “Hey! We already have this mold created! Let’s make more of these and just sell them to others as our own design!”

Honestly? There’s nothing I can do to stop my manufacturers from doing this from a legal perspective. Everybody will casually say to me “why not patent your designs?!” but a patent costs thousands of dollars and if I buy a patent here in Canada, it only protects me in Canada, not other countries. On top of that, just trying to sue somebody for using your design will be its own challenge with many incurred fees.

Anyway, somebody online mentioned Temu’s IP Portal to try to remove products for Intellectual Property infringement, so I tried it, and it worked! I got two listings removed. That was a pleasant surprise.

I’m still going to keep making products. 🙂