Interesting piece in The Fashion Blog today about Muji’s travails at the hands of Chinese copycats who are lifting Muji’s aesthetic and selling off the back of a brand that isn’t a brand… so to speak.
Confused?
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“Muji became one of Japan’s most recognizable brands by selling simple, practical items that it hopes will last for decades,” Bloomberg asserted this week. However, “It turns out that ‘less is more’ has its limits as a business strategy,” and one of the key struggles facing the almost 40-year old Japanese consumer goods retailer – which, despite embarking on a massive international expansion in the 2000’s and growing its revenues to $3.7 billion as a result, just reported its first decline in operating profit in nearly a decade – is Chinese copycats.
The Tokyo-based giant, whose name Mujirushi Ry?hin is translated as No Brand Quality Goods, has become known for offering up a wide-ranging stable of simple, minimally-design goods – from notebooks and bone china kitchenware to organic cotton t-shirts and French linen shift dresses. The “one unique commonality” of all of these products. As brand consultant Michael Hu notes, “They have no manufacturer branding, not even a private label brand.”
Given that its simple, minimally-design inventory is largely unchanging, and with its across-the-board no-logo or “no-brand” policy in mind, Muji has become relatively easy prey for a wiftly-growing “cottage industry of Chinese competitors, which have sprung up to offer the same aesthetic for a fraction of the cost.” The entry of copycat creators is further bolstered by the fact that Muji’s price “are considerably more expensive outside of Japan due to taxes and tariffs.”
And there is little that Muji can really do about it, precisely for the very reasons that found it favor in the first place: its simple, logo-free designs are likely unprotectable from a legal perspective. Muji’s plain white porcelain tea pot, which mirrors the design of countless other simple tea pots, is hardly the “sculptural work” that the U.S. Copyright Act is willing to protect. After all, as the U.S. Copyright Office Practices manual explicitly states, copyright law “does not protect mere variations on a familiar symbol or design, either in two or three-dimensional form.”
