By producing a staggering 80% of the worlds counterfeit goods, China’s copycat culture has become the most famous in the world! From luxury gadgets and fashion, to cheap snacks and food, there’s an identical Chinese version of just about anything!
Imitation may be the greatest form of flattery, but some bootleggers know no bounds when it comes to ripping off a good idea. With that, lets’ explore some of the most side splitting Chinese knockoffs that are just way too obvious!
Fast Food Rip Offs
Does the establishment below look "finger lickin’ good" to you? On a second look, you might notice that Colonel Sanders isn’t looking quite like himself. In fact, his famous face has been completely replaced by a younger Chinese guy in a cap!
And
what is KFG meant to stand for? Kentucky Fried Ginger? Everything from the logo down to the three letter name of that fast food joint is a blatant copy of KFC! And what’s more, even the interior looks the same!But it’s not the only joint trying to muscle in on the Colonel’s turf! This utter abomination below also shares the KFG name, but it’s taken it a step further by changing the tag line from “Finger Lickin’ Good” to the strangely suggestive “Nibble His Chicken”!
And it’s not just the Colonel who’s been undermined, The King has also been copied! Unless Burger King’s Chinese franchises have changed their name to "Cheese Burger". You’d have thought they’d try something a little more inventive! Like those guys who took it up a level to "Texas Burger", and even added in the little copyright symbol in the corner.But guess what, "Texas Burger" is an entirely different, copyrighted chain of burger joints based in, you’ll never guess, Texas! That’s one large copyright combo coming right up!
Now, to get all that Texan heat out of your mouth, wouldn’t you like something cool and delicious from "Dairy Queen"? In China, that ice cream monarch has a blatant imposter sitting on the throne, called "Dairy Fairy".
Almost everything about those stores mimics the cold cream queen, right down to the names of their products! You want a world famous Blizzard? At Dairy Fairy, they’ll serve you up a "Snowstorm"!
Next, we have the real copycat clown! Just take a look below at Wuzhou city’s bizarrely named burger joint "Michael Alone". You may not recognize the name, but you probably know those suspiciously shaped, upside down golden arches. But the best part of that McDonald’s knockoff is the tag line, "I'm Like It." To be honest, it hasn’t quite got the same ring to it. To Michael Alone’s credit, they did change their sign recently. But it wasn’t to remove the arches! Instead, they just flipped the M in the name, changing it to Wichael Alone.
But all of those pale in comparison to the sheer number of Chinese copycats that Starbucks has to deal with. The café’s classic green, white, and black logo has seen some of the most brazenly obvious knock off’s such as Sunbucks Coffee, Usabucks Coffee, Xingbake coffee shop, and Qingdao Starsbuck Coffee F & B!The copycat trend got so out of hand that it even spread into neighboring Korea, which set up, and brace yourself for the next one, ‘Star ***** Coffe’. That’s just offensive, how dare they spell coffee that wrong!
Knock Off Stores
China really puts the convenience in "conveniently looks like another brand", especially when it comes to their 7 Eleven rip off.
Granted, 7 Eleven’s name comes from its extended opening hours of 7am to 11 pm, and that 7 Twelve seems to be named after that same logic. But that color palette and logo layout are unforgivably obvious copies! That’s one Big Gulp of copyright infringement.Have you ever walked into a sneaker store, looked at the products, and wondered "what if this isn’t genuine Nibe?". Worry no more, because China has a bunch of knockoff Nike shoe stores under the oddly ticked ‘Nibe’ brand.
The name change is almost sneaky enough to go unnoticed, with the "B" looking convincingly like a "K," but that trademark tick is too much. It looks like a duck that’s been tipped forward. Maybe the odd shape is intentional, so they could change their tag line to ‘Just Duck It’!
But Nike aren’t the only brand seeing sneaky sneaker knockoffs! One shameless copycat created an entire fake Yeezy store in the middle of Wenzhou city, complete with Yeezy founder Kanye West’s cartoon as its logo!
Fake adidas YEEZY Store Has Just Opened in China by weloveadidas That’s an insanely bold move considering that
Yeezy don’t have any dedicated stores yet! And even though they’re fake, they still sport that real Yeezy price. Some of their basic boots rack up to about $150 a pair, but others like a pair of flower power fakes reach a whopping $300!
However, the pièce de resistance of China’s shop front scams has got to be the next one. The name "titty&Co." may make you titter, but I doubt the CEO’s of the prestigious Tiffany and Co company are laughing about it! The high class jewelers have had the style and color scheme of their brand taken by a tiny clothing store at a mall in Hong Kong.
And thanks to an amazing mistranslation, the shop owners have made real boobs out of themselves with that name. Perhaps they realized the mistake they made, and then whacked the sign up anyway just to make the breast of a bad situation!
Fake Alcohol
China has a pretty serious problem with fake alcohol. Dangerous bathtub brewed booze with fake labels make up as much as a 3rd of the countries alcohol. While some look convincing, others like the bottles of Johnnie Worker are much easier to spot.
You can only wonder if Johnnie Worker has any relation to Johnnie Walker, the famous scotch whiskey distiller. Their Red Label whiskey is ‘distilled, blended, and bottled in Scotland’, but this Red Labial stuff below seems to have been ‘distilled, blended, and olded in Yantai Tianchi’.If that’s put you off Johnnie Walker, maybe stick to something safe like old, reliable Jack Daniels. Except, the longer you look at this bottle of the iconic whiskey below, the more wrong it gets! Despite the similar black and white style of the label, that doesn’t say Jack Daniels, that says Joens Danhse. And while Jack Daniels is made in Tennessee, that has been made in tenderness? Well, it actually lists a winery in Shandong, China as its source. But I bet they’re hoping whoever drinks that is too drunk to tell the difference!Last one on the fake alcohol front, we have 2020 in a bottle. Cerono! A beer that looks a little too similar to Corona to be a coincidence. Not only does the label and name look near identical to the Mexican beer, but Cerono also claims to be a superior quality Mexico brand.
Crappy Off-Brands
The Star Wars franchise famously takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. But not far enough to stop China from ripping off their Lego line of merchandise! At first, this image below looks like a legitimate toy TIE fighter, complete with storm trooper mask and a range of nondescript figures from the series.
But even with the copied font, it’s not enough to distract from the name ‘Space Wars’! What’s more, the iconic shape and color of the Lego logo has been copied by a company called BELA. That’s two big brand name knockoffs in one.But that’s not the only disturbance in the force the franchise has felt, just look at the bogus box picture below! How are you meant to say “STAR WNRS”? Star Winners? Star Wieners?
Even though some Chinese Lego knockoffs can look like the real deal, there’s one
franchise that definitely doesn’t! With its helmet of hair, oddly lidded eyes, and creepy expression, the toy below looks more like the kind of stranger your mom told you not to talk to than comedy legend Mr. Bean!
As you’ve probably guessed, it wasn’t Lego behind that terrifying knickknack, but a Chinese knockoff company called Jia Li Bao, who also copied the red squared design of Lego’s logo! It was based on the family friendly, animated adventures of Mr. Bean, a reputable toy manufacturer probably wouldn't think that demonic design was appropriate for kids!
But kids don’t just have illegitimate Lego to worry about, as proven by the creepy Pikachu and SpongeBob SquarePants collaboration in the post below! “Wish you have a nice day?” That'd be nearly impossible after seeing that abomination!Counterfeit kids show characters often wind up mashed together in a terrifying mix of faces, body parts, and names to be as disturbingly recognizable as possible. Like this pack of “Super S Heroes”!
Even though you can see Mr. Incredible and Power Rangers on the packaging, the contents make no sense. It contains Spiderman, Super Man with a chinstrap beard, Batman who has seen some things, a couple of insanely shredded Power Rangers, and the red guy on the right who we don't know who he is meant to be.
Have you ever seen the
Titanic movie? The one set in 1912 where a boat peacefully traversing the North Atlantic suddenly changes into a transformer and fights a giant iceberg? In case you don't remember any transformers in it, how do you explain The Titanic-Bot in the post below?
Made in China, someone there clearly thought the tragic tale of the sunken ship would make a sick transformer toy for the kids! But if you thought it was just boys toys China could botch so badly, take a good look at the outstandingly named "Blandness Girl" mobile phone toy below!
Between the Disney font and blonde Barbie cartoon, it’s pretty clear what vibe they were going for. But there seems to have been a breakdown in communication around the name! It's known that Barbie has a personality that’s about as deep as a puddle, but Blandness Girl is putting it way too bluntly.
Copycat Food
Because absolutely nothing is sacred anymore, some of your favorite branded snacks have also had the Chinese copycat treatment. M & M's used to have a classic, simple packaging. But they made it too easy to rip off, as China’s own version of the snack had an almost identical package with the two M‘s flipped upside down!
If it’s a nutty chocolate treat on the go that you’re craving, you might confuse your pot of "Nutella & Go" with China’s matter of factly named "Chocolate Good"! The rip off takes it to a whole other level. Not only did they steal the entire color and font design from Nutella, they also plastered their crappy copy logo over the same Nutella pot!If you take a look, you will find that the breadsticks are in the exact same position! The bad English tag line "Delicious to share with you" makes no sense, and as if they couldn’t get any lazier, the brand name is literally just "Chocolate". That really puts the sweet in "Sweet Jesus".The most audacious of all those food forgeries is one that already defies belief! "I can’t believe it’s not butter" is an American margarine brand with a name that was just too good for China not to hilariously mistranslate. ‘Unbelievable this is not butter’ is a copycat spread that’s made all the better by its lack of trans fats, cholesterol, and punctuation!
Counterfeit Fashion
When it comes to clothes, China is the absolute king of counterfeits! The fake markets of Beijing and Shanghai are so notorious that they’ve become a tourist hotspot in recent years, with some of their products near impossible to tell apart from the real things!
Although some products like iPhone branded boots, stand out for all the wrong reasons! While Apple has been expanding out into wearable tech for some time, the image below is probably not what they had in mind! In a weird, but bold, fashion move, the UK cartoon character Pepper Pig has become a high fashion fakery focus! Popular Chinese stars like Angelababy and Yang Mi sported the little pink pig on their shirts back in 2017.
It encouraged counterfeiters to ride the trend wave and start intertwining the cartoon with faux labels like Chanel, Dior, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton. The bizarre brand overlap even made it onto bucket hats!
Although when it comes to faux fashion, no one suffers quite as much as American skateboarding brand Supreme, or “Superme” if you’re in China. That dubious misspelling and similar styling makes it onto everything from sandals to t-shirts!
But those misspelt knockoffs are the least of Supreme’s problems. Back in 2019, a huge,
Supreme mega-store opened in the middle of Shanghai. On the surface, it seemed legitimate, until you read the slogan that was plastered on the wall. “We’re just having fun. We don’t care who see”. Being a billion dollar company, you’d think Supreme could afford to check their grammar!So, it might not surprise you to learn that the entire mega-store is one mega knockoff! In fact, Supreme didn’t even have a trademark in China until 2020. But when fans of the brand saw the inside of the fake store compared to its authentic, New York counterpart, they were left jealous. Some even said they preferred the interior of the fake brand store over the real one!
Counterfeit Tech
Technology is where China’s counterfeit market truly outdoes itself. Some of the knockoffs look so good that they can even make the real ones look fake! But when they fail, they look spectacularly wrong. Like the counterfeit iPhones, or should you call them iPears?
Aside from the pear-shaped logo making them stand out, they also sport a website at their bottom. Sadly, it no longer seems to be in service, although putting your website on that blatant forgery took a serious pear!
But it’s not the worst
iPhone forgery that exists. There exists the GooApple, a Frankenstein phone designed to look like an iPhone, running Google’s Android operating system, with an iOS interface! To some, it looks like the best of both worlds, but others see it as a high-tech abomination!
What you may not know is that the GooApple isn’t Googles first counterfeit, cross brand conundrum. The logo Goojje dot com, a Chinese knock off search engine.
Google Asks China Search Engine to Stop Using Its Logo: Video by Bloomberg Originals You probably recognize the style of the letters from the old Google logo, but that blue paw comes from Baidu, another search engine that’s more popular in China. It first appeared back in 2010 after Google threatened to pull out of the Chinese market. Just days later, Goojje was up and running! They didn’t even wait until Googles Chinese grave was cold.And speaking of graves, not even death will dissuade China from copying a product, as the banner below horrendously shows!
It’s advertising a knock off iPad called the "Action Pad", held by Asia’s answer to the famously dead Steve Jobs! From the trademark black turtleneck, to the closely cropped hair and spectacles, it’s so obviously meant to be the American tech entrepreneur who passed away in 2011. And that’s not a detail they conveniently forgot about, just look at the angel wings and halo! While this is probably not Steve talking to China beyond the grave, he’s probably spinning in his.
Copycat Films
When most people think of piracy, the image that springs to mind is illegally downloading films or buying bootleg DVDs from black market street vendors. But the Chinese film industry is copying much more than that, and the proof is in the posters!
A copy casualty was the 2009 poster for Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes movie. It made a staggering $524 million at the box office that year, thanks in part to its well designed promotional images.
The blue-ish paneled wall and murky looking fog gave off the feeling of a grimy, Victorian-era England! But in 2011 an unrelated Chinese TV series called ‘Detective Tanglang’ used the exact same style backdrop! Did they think no-one would notice? It’s a detective show for crying out loud!
However, posters for kids films and animations have been just as easy to copy! Cars 2 was released in 2011 by American company Disney, to the joy of many fans. But just 4 years later the shamelessly similar "The Autobots" rolled out onto China’s silver screens. To add insult to injury, The Autobots’ creator insisted that he had never seen any movies in the Cars franchise before! I’ll believe that once Disney’s lawsuit with them is settled. But the animation knockoff station has one final departure, in the form of the smash-hit Zootopia. In a world once again created by America’s Disney, the promotional poster shows a reimagined urban jungle inhabited by human like animals. It’s perfectly fun, bright, and kid friendly, so when the film "Crazy Toy City" was released in China in 2016, they simply lifted the promotional poster’s entire layout!
Looking at the two side by side, it’s impossible to miss the similarities: the crosswalk sign, the street sign, the shape of the main characters ears, even the angle the image is taken from! But the film’s producers, MSI and Wuhan Digital Media, have insisted that Crazy Toy City is entirely original. If you were amazed at these Chinese knock offs, you might also want to read about unbelievable things that
only happen in China. Thanks for reading!
