Outfitting Urban Thieves

For most of suburban America, Urban Outfitters is their outlet to everything that is cool, trendy, and "avant-garde." They see it as a source for what people in the big cities are wearing and they feel hip shopping there. Within the grassroots fashion designer circle, Urban Outfitters is seen as a very EVIL empire. Urban Outfitters has been known to spy on up-and-coming designers and steal their designs. They have also been known to copy indie designers and then quickly mass-produce and claim their designs.

Johnny Cupcakes (indie designer in Boston) released a few tee shirts displaying cupcakes falling from an airplane. A few weeks later, similar tee shirts were seen in Urban Outfitters picturing slightly different cupcakes falling from slightly different airplanes. Clearly industry espionage and theft! The current tees at Urban Outfitters are suspiciously similar to original brands such as Barking Irons, Rag and Bone and Beard and Bangs.

This kind of design theft kills business for the designers who are truly creating from experience, thought and life. It is easy for Urban to milk money from suburban kids desperately striving to be urban-hip. Good designers deserve all the attention they can get and Urban Outfitters creates an impermeable roadblock for those designers who are truly innovative and artistic.

Don't you hate it when someone steals an idea that you thought of first? How do you think designers feel when Urban steals their designs and then claims to be authentic and bohemian? Urban Outfitters executes its manipulating marketing strategy toward teens very well and tries to foster this feeling of faux authenticity and bohemia. In reality, Urban is the antithesis of everything that is authentic and bohemian. I would even say that they are doing a good job at killing the ideologies of bohemia.

Support local designers. Don't shop at Urban Outfitters. Know before you buy.