Do these look the same to you? Part 1

A knock-off case study with an ever-thickening plot.

The following was written, edited, and rewritten over the course of the past two weeks.

Please note that none of the questions below are rhetorical; I hope we can discuss this in the comments, even though we share all of the same opinions on everything, always. (If you’re reading this via email, you’ll have to click over to the Substack website to participate.)

10/8/24

I woke up today exhausted from all the days before. Primed for outrage. Parched mouth, eyes crusted over, all I needed was a teensy little spark to get fired up. I scrolled Instagram, like flicking at a BIC. Suddenly there it was: a block of text. Oh, the drama of a block of text on a platform meant for rabid visual consumption!

This text block was curiously posted by one of the foremost purveyors of non-text Instagram eye candy, glass artist Helle Mardahl. I don’t remember a time before her blob-ular, colorful creations existed throughout my feed and explore page, the most popular being her two-tone jars. Appropriately called Bon Bons, you can buy them in sizes mini to mega for around $500 and up. If Copenhagen-core could be summed up in a shortlist of brands, it would be: Ganni, Saks Potts, Tekla, Hay, and Helle Mardahl. Even if you, like me, have never taken a moment to consider their maker, let alone the pronunciation of her name, you have probably seen her Bon Bons.

Bon Bons via @hellemardahl Instagram.

So why is Helle typing and not blobbing on this fine day? Because she is exposing a shameless (alleged!) copycat: a brand by the name of Glowery. Once a dusty beige-and-gold Goop lookalike which, quite fittingly, peddled collagen powder for skinny blondes in molded cardboard tubes, the brand’s Instagram sharply pivoted this past July with rainbow-saturated “behind-the-scenes” photos and montages teasing their upcoming skincare launch—packaged in Helle’s renowned Bon Bons.

Left: Glowery’s new skincare line. Right: my quick comp of similar Bon Bons. Thoughts?

Of course, those are not actually Helle’s Bon Bons, even if you agree that they are her designs. Though Helle was classy and restrained in her wording (and while it satiated my apparent need for drama this day), her post also gave me the ick for reasons I continue to digest. The similarities were so blatant, I needed to believe there was more to the story.

Linking this post here.

Helle highlights the big issue of commercial creativity: ownership of most creative work is basically ungovernable. If art is subjective, how can an objective set of rules be applied? Yes, there is trademark law, but this is where the “basically” qualifier I just used comes in—the resources needed to protect one’s IP are too great for a vast majority of creatives, even relatively successful ones who sell or otherwise commercialize their work. When you deal in concepts, shapes, textures, colors, and sounds, credit for a good creative idea seems to be always ripe for the taking.

With no clear legal recourse (I suspect that her bicolor blobs are not trademark-able, even if she tried), Helle’s hand was forced: she had to draw the Sword Of Cancellation. Her initial strike was swift—that foreboding block of text beneath a carousel of images, making plain the egregious rip-off. She posted it right there in the feed, two days before Glowery’s skincare launch, no less (they’d been hyping it to a small set of followers between the brand and the founder's Instagram accounts).

Helle’s strategy? Napoleonic. The offensive (meant in all ways) was ambushed, Glowery’s only resort being to block Helle’s account, so she could no longer tag @helloglowery, directly linking to their profile from the post. Oh, but Queen Helle has spent years amassing her following, just shy of 200,000. And a good, kind lord was she—week by week, providing us with generous rations of colorful Bon Bon pics and delightful soft-sells reminding us that Mother’s Day, in one country or another, is looming. Now, as she mounts her warhorse, she calls on her most loyal followers to take action. We must protect what is hers by divine right, if not by trademark law. "Grab ye pitchforks, girls. We ride at dawn, EST!”

Battle-hardened from a decade in the d2c trenches, I was one of the first to step forward to honor my fealty. “Shameless,” I commented beneath Helle’s post, before typing “glowery” into the search bar and venturing into enemy territory. I would never heckle or harass them on social media (like others brandishing pitchforks that day), but I had to know: just who is Glowery? Surely there is more to the story. I tapped, scrolled, tapped my way to the founder’s personal page. This marked my descent into madness.

I understand how painful it is to be ripped off, and to have others take credit for my work. I am all too familiar with the mental gymnastics of trying to convince yourself that someone didn’t rip you off, so you don’t have to feel bad about it. I understand, too, what it’s like to be (wrongfully) accused of ripping someone off. I even understand what it’s like for someone to publicly call me out (for what I thought was an obvious Irving Penn homage), as if I’d committed a felony. Whether or not Glowery did anything wrong here, I can only imagine how terrible it must feel to be on the receiving end of an internet onslaught.

It brings me no joy to be hyper-critical of an individual in a public forum, even one who “puts herself out there” as a public figure. I find targeted internet harassment some of the foulest human behavior, not to mention rarely effective. Though I have an entire podcast basically devoted to gossiping about and critiquing the beauty industry (Eyewitness Beauty, now on Substack!), I do try to “both-sides” issues. The problem is that sometimes when I imagine myself in someone else’s shoes, it can make me dislike them even more.

For all of these reasons, I’m not going to name the founder of Glowery, because it doesn’t matter, though what she represents does. She’s a model-esque millennial French woman with about 12k Instagram followers, who set her account to private shortly after Helle’s post (though it’s public again as of publication time). At a glance, her content suggests a life of privilege and wealth; she’s on a seemingly never-ending vacation. Not represented is a history of wellness or skincare expertise, despite being the founder, face, and CEO of a collagen supplement-turned-Gen Z skincare startup. From what is represented online, compounded with my own predispositions and presumptions, Glowery’s founder is a perfect example of a particular type of entrepreneur which causes me great mental and emotional anguish¹: a foundfluencer.

Not to be confused with influencers-turned-founders (who aim to profit from a large-scale, existing fanbase), foundfluencers can be difficult to spot to the untrained eye. For the purposes of this saga, just know that most foundfluencers suffer from the opposite of imposter syndrome. Impressively over-confident, they often do not see any issue with behavior which would be deemed alarmingly inauthentic to those who notice, let alone care (I’m assuming since you’re here, you are one of “those”).

A foundfluencer’s business exists solely as a tool to grow their own notoriety, an outward show of purpose. So, any challenge to, or critique of their business is taken as a personal attack. An earlier version of this article had a 13-point list of ways to identify them, but it felt a bit pointed. Plus, it takes us away from the issue at hand: Bon bons.

I hope you don’t think I’m scandalized by knock-off packaging alone for an entire 2-part article. It was Glowery’s founder’s response that had me questioning my own intelligence. First, she blamed her toddler:

Selections from the 11-part carousel of what many critics claim are staged behind-the-scenes images of a toddler’s design process, and full caption of Glowery’s response to Helle’s allegations. Glowery has since deleted this post.

Part 2 is here.

1. Mainly due to my own insecurities about how I’m perceived professionally and online.