Over the past couple of weeks, the crafting community has been targeting retailer Urban Outfitters, accusing them of ripping off their designs. UO and its sister company Anthropologie are infamous for these accusations, but now that social media has been giving artists more of a platform and an audience, will the retailers be able to get away with it as easily? Judging by the store’s decision to take one item off their shelves, probably not.
First, the piece that started it all. Stevie Koerner designed the piece of jewelry below as part of her “The World/United States of Love” line. She calls it “I Heart NY.”
And here is what UO tried to pass off as its own, calling it “I Heart __”:
Regretsy pointed out that similar items by even more designers appear on Etsy, and while it’s possible that a bunch of people just had a similar idea, UO’s apparent ripoff went further than just the piece itself — Koerner says on her Tumblr page that they also stole her copy. So if UO was trying to hide the fact that they ripped someone off, they could have been a lot smarter about it.
But then, the story started spreading like wildfire on Twitter, reaching beyond the crafting community and as far as the likes of Miley Cyrus, who also got on the company’s case about their CEO’s anti-equality donations. (We never thought we’d say this, but rock on, Miley Cyrus!) Amber Karnes of crafting site My Aim Is True tweeted about the UO situation and promptly got 56 responses. And then 121. From there, she became a trending topic, the crafting community started speaking up even more, and the story was unstoppable.
This made its way onto The Huffington Post and Boing Boing, and from there, there was no stopping it.
Urban Outfitters, it seems, was caught red-handed by the Internet. And that adds up to a public relations debacle. As Karnes puts it on her site, “Behold the power of social media muscle.”
After people started posting on UO’s Facebook page about the accusations, images of the “I Heart” item were gone. Karnes also said that a store employee was told to pull the items from the floor immediately.
In response to this barrage of bad press, Urban Outfitters said via Twitter that their “accessories buying team was looking into this” and issued the following statement (emphasis ours):
Urban Outfitters unequivocally denies copying independent jewelry maker Stephanie Koerner …
In her recent blog post and on Twitter Koerner claims that Urban Outfitters stole her designs or was inspired in some way by the items in her Etsy shop for our I Heart Destination necklaces. In fact, a quick search on Etsy for ‘state necklace’ reveals several other sellers with similar products (as seen here on Regretsy) who offered their wares as much as a year earlier than Ms. Koerner.
We are not implying that Koerner stole her necklace idea from one of these other designers, we are simply stating the obvious — that the idea is not unique to Koerner and she can in no way claim to be its originator.
Normally we would not respond publicly to Koerner’s allegations, but we believe the media response to her campaign is threatening to impact the dozens of independent designers we work with on a daily basis. For many of them, having their work sold at Urban Outfitters is a very positive turning point in their careers, and we will not allow their hard work and commitment, or ours, to be undermined by these false allegations.
Utter defensiveness aside, UO just acknowledged that social media basically forced them to address something they’ve been able to sidestep for years. And you can bet that the accusations will not go away, and UO will not be able to avoid it anymore. And that is some serious social media muscle.
