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Brand-name goods in China


Brand-name goods in China

Items with big worldwide brand labels sold in China may be bogus, especially expensive sporting goods like brand name running shoes or golf clubs. By no means all are bogus; most of the major companies do market in China, but some will be unauthorized or downright bogus. If you are buying genuine branded foreign goods, particularly haute couture brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada, it will not be cheaper than buying them in Western countries. In fact, wealthy Chinese who can afford to travel often purchase luxury brand name goods in Hong Kong or overseas, as it is usually significantly cheaper than buying them in mainland China. There are a number of sources of potential knock-offs or fake brand name goods.
  • The most common variant comes from a Chinese firm that gets a contract to deliver, say, 100,000 shirts to BigBrand. They actually have to make a few more than that because some will fail quality control. Maybe 105,000? What the heck, make 125,000. Any extras will be easy to sell; after all they have the BigBrand label. So 25,000 shirts ? a few "factory seconds" and many perfectly good shirts ? arrive on the Chinese market, without BigBrand's authorization. A traveler might be happy to buy these ? just check carefully to avoid the seconds and you get exactly the shirt BigBrand sells for a much better price.
  • However, it doesn't end there. If the factory owner is greedy, he goes on to crank out a bunch more. Only now he doesn't have to worry about BigBrand's strict quality control. He can cut a few corners, slap the BigBrand label on them, and make a great profit. These may or may not be a good buy, but in any case they are not what you would expect from BigBrand.
  • Finally, of course, some other factory may be cranking out utterly bogus "BigBrand" shirts. On these outright forgeries, they often misspell the brand name, which is a dead giveaway.
  • Fake brand oddities include items such as a reversible jacket with "Adidas" on one side and "Nike" on the other or reversible socks with two brands. While these might be interesting curiosities, they definitely are not genuine examples of either brand. There are two basic rules for dealing with expensive brand name goods in China.
  • First, you cannot just trust the brand; inspect the goods carefully for flaws. Check the spelling on labels.
  • Second, if the deal seems too good to be true, be very suspicious. China makes a lot of good cheap products, but a hundred dollar "Rolex" is utterly certain to be bogus.
  • Bogus goods can cause legal problems. Selling "pirate" DVDs or forged brand name goods is illegal in China, but enforcement is lax. It is generally much less lax at customs for travelers' home countries. Customs officials will seize pirate DVDs or bogus brand name goods if they find them. Some Western travelers have even reported having to pay hefty fines after being caught returning home with bogus products. Counterfeit and swing production markets in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing are nonetheless fantastically amusing and a great place to get a completely new "designer" wardrobe for a fraction of the cost in a Western country. Feel free to purchase these items but remove the tags prior to packing them out of the country, if you have a suitcase full of brand new tagged designer knock-offs or swing produced clothes, you are likely to be hassled at home. The likely worst case scenario is you will lose the items and receive a fine; the best case scenario is you will lose the items. Simply remove the tags and they will almost certainly go unnoticed with the rest of your belongings.

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    China Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.

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