True story.

We’re paging through a catalog from one of America’s largest retailers and find one of our picture frames offered for sale. Only we hadn’t sold it to them.

I call their buyer and ask where they’d gotten the frame. I’m not making this up.

“Oh, we loved the handcrafted look of your frames, but we found our factory in the Philippines could make them for us them much cheaper.”

Hello, anyone home?

Such is the ethical condition of the marketplace today. Knock-offs abound. Many corporations in the gift and home industry have legal teams instead of design teams. And Asian manufacturers hide behind their government’s unwillingness to honor US copyrights. Sad but true.

Please understand that every one of our designs is copyrighted and is protected under US Copyright law. The same is true of Annie’s verse (including “Home is Where Your Story Begins”).

And while pursuing knock-offs is our least favorite part of doing business, we take it seriously as a responsibility we owe to our customers and employees. We all have a lot invested in DD’s unique look and feel.

Ugly bottom line: If you’re here as a manufacturer looking for “inspiration”, please don’t hide behind the faulty logic “If we change it just a little, they can’t come after us.” Our legal team would be happy to point out the flaw in that reasoning precedent by precedent, line by line, case by case. If you develop product meant to springboard off our look, you’re liable for prosecution.

And if you’re a customer or interested market-watcher, we’d love to hear from you with knock-offs you’ve seen that we may have missed. America’s copyright laws are “self-policing”. We have to go after infringers ourselves. You can help by alerting us to lines that appear to be DD knock-offs.

Together we can foster creativity by bringing parasitic practices into the light. Enough said on that ugly topic.