San Francisco-based Peak Design CEO Peter Dering said his company’s “Everyday Sling” bag became a target for Amazon to copy after becoming the site’s leading retail camera bag “by longshot. “
Camera maker Peak Design accused Amazon this week of copying one of its products.
Peak Design has been selling an “Everyday Sling” bag on its site since 2017. Last October, something with a very similar design and available for one-third of the price appeared on Amazon.
San Francisco-based Peak Design CEO Peter Dering said his company’s “Everyday Sling” bag became a target for Amazon to copy after becoming the site’s leading retail camera bag “by longshot. “
“It feels like somewhere in Amazon is a bell ringing, which says ‘Okay, this one is worth our time to knock,'” said Dering in an interview. “And that kind of thing happened to us eventually.”
Dering decided to go public with his concerns. On Wednesday, Peak Design released an ad, titled “A Tale of Two Slings: Peak Design and Amazon Basics,” which will compromise Dering and draw fun at Amazon’s “copycat” product. Shortly after the ad went live, Peak Design customers flooded Amazon’s listing for the “Amazon Basics Everyday Sling” with a negative rating, enough until Amazon sent disabled reviews on the item.
Representatives from Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Peak Design isn’t the first company to question how the sales giant comes up with its own products. Allbirds co-president Joey Zwillinger in 2019 called out on Amazon to release a knit shoe with a “similar look” to its own product. A recent Wall Street Journal study in April last year found that Amazon is using data from third-party sellers to help improve their private products.
The issue was also widely explored in the House Reviews subcommittee’s 400-page report, published last October, which examined the business practices of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook.
Amazon’s private label business has been growing steadily since its launch in 2007. For many years, Amazon has offered a range of private label products, from telephones to microwave and t-shirts, under the AmazonBasics brand. It also manufactures private label products under other brand names.
The company has at least 111 private label brands offering 22,617 products, according to a Coresight Research report published in May last year. That’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of Amazon’s sprawling marketplace, which offers millions of results.
While private label logos make up a fraction of Amazon’s entire business, retailers and logos like Peak Design say they are frustrated that they have to compete with Amazon’s private label lines, especially when which comes to prices.
Peak Design is complaining to Amazon that they will cancel the “Everyday Sling,” which was first launched in 2017.
Peak Design’s “99 Daily Sling” is priced at $ 99, and the “Amazon Basics Everyday Sling” costs $ 35.14. Dering said Amazon ‘s ability to offer a version of its sling bag at such a discounted price “is completely impacting our business in a very big way.” Amazon changed the name of the bag to “Amazon Basics Camera Bag” after Peak Designs released its video.
Amazon in October 2020 launched “Everyday Sling” which Peak Design says is a similar product to its own.
“Certainly a percentage of customers who were looking at the‘ Everyday Sling ’Peak Design saw the Amazon next to it because they advertise heavily around it,” Dering said. “So that customer is going to have that option.”
It is common for grocery stores and department stores to develop their own brands and promote them to customers. Retailers and logos say that what sets Amazon’s behavior apart from other retailers is its ability to gather accurate, historical data from activity across the platform that it can use to advantage .
Amazon has the ability to “click all about the demographic of the customer who likes this particular bag, who bought it, how many customers searched and didn’t click, click on a similar product so they can serve a product next to it, “Jason Boyce, a former Amazon retailer and now a consultant to third – party merchants, said in an interview.” the amount of data that Amazon collects does not make matters fair. “
Boyce was interviewed by lawyers during a House trust subcommittee inquiry. He has raised concerns again about Amazon’s private label business, after the wholesale giant launched a private label bocce ball set that looked very similar to his own, down to the “color scheme special ”designed by the Boyce brand.
Amazon has previously argued that there is no incentive to abuse the trust of third-party sellers because third-party sales make up more than half of the company’s total sales, going over their own first business. The company also says that while it uses aggregated data from merchants, it has policies that prohibit the use of individual vendor data to inform their private label strategy.
However, the House trust and WSJ subcommittee report revealed gaps in these policies, which may mean that complete sales data are as individual vendor data when a single vendor has control.
Retailers and brands like Peak Design are increasingly developing to give public swipes at Amazon for what they believe the innovations are putting pressure on their business.
Dering said he thinks Amazon Basics’ s-looking sling infringes on Peak Design’s patented design for the “Everyday Sling.” The company was pressured to file a lawsuit, but decided They eventually released the short ad, hoping it would spark a public conversation about Amazon’s “flippant copippatting”.
“I thought it was the perfect perfect branch,” Dering said. “I get a lot of fun with this. I’d never have fun with a lawsuit.”