Amazon Basics Copies Peak Design

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Amazon doesn’t care. It cares about making money, and anything short of outright illegality is fair game at their scale. I have absolutely no doubt that everyone who sells their product through Amazon is doing a deal with the devil. You can bet every dollar that Amazon harvests its sellers’ data as much as its customers’, precisely to determine Amazon’s next big-selling product.

Sure the Amazon bag looks cheap and nasty, but plenty of people will buy it for exactly the same reasons. Smug videos will not change that, and while I’m sure it’s personally gratifying it’s a harsh fact of business life that you will always be undercut. Either find the part of the market where you can make money, or get out and go do something else.

Nature may be “red in tooth and claw,” but it ain’t got squat on Big Business for cold ruthless Darwinism. You may wish to go swimming with a ravenous shoal of great white sharks for some gentle relaxation after surviving a round in the ring with FAANG. If you survive, that is.

Realistically all Peak can do here is go high, marketing their premium product to discerning customers who appreciate premium product design and manufacturing, and are happy to drop top coin for that instead of cheap crap. See also: knockoff Rolexes, knockoff Gucci handbags, and so on and so on. Plenty people buy those too but you don’t see those brands wringing their hands over it in public. They already know who their customers are—and aren’t—and they get on with the job. Don’t get distracted from selling your product, ’cos that is what’s really fatal (ask me how I know/don’t ask).

>Stop me if you’ve heard this before

Okay, I'm stopping you.

Are you going to paste this same plainly absurd comment everywhere? I'm not even sure what your point is, that people shouldn't talk about this? I wasn't aware of what Amazon was doing here, I'm the kind of person who buys camera bags, so this was useful information for me.

Peak Design doesn't need to stop Amazon, they just need to retain enough of a market to make money. This gave them a lot of attention, which certainly helps.

>Don’t get distracted from selling your product

You do understand that this is exactly what they're doing, right? This is probably the most effective marketing campaign they have ever run.

Why does this make you so angry?

What are you trying to achieve with these comments?

(Also, you're wrong about how biological evolution works.)

"Sure the Amazon bag looks cheap and nasty, but plenty of people will buy it for exactly the same reasons. Smug videos will not change that"

Those people probably wouldn’t have bought the pricey original, though. The video isn’t to stop Amazon, it’s just advertising. And it worked. Now a lot more people know the original.

> Stop me

Please stop.