Who’s “Duping” Whom? OPI Swiss 2010 versus China Glaze Vintage Vixen

Remember the big brouhaha OPI had, shortly after they filed suit against etailers? In May 2010, Temptalia posted a promo photo of OPI’s fall 2010 collection, and OPI sent the site owner a cease-and-desist letter. Part of OPI’s argument against promo pics being online included the rationalization that if other retailers could see their collections, they’d duplicate OPI’s collections and get them to market faster, thus undercutting OPI’s profit potential. (Several other companies use the same rationale for asking sites to remove promo pics, and / or for not sending out promo materials.) This backfired on them in a rather singular fashion.

This was in late May 2010.

In -=early=- May 2010, nail bloggers began posting swatch pics of China Glaze’s Vintage Vixen collection. It included twelve colors, a mixture of glass-flecks, frosts, and a very few cremes. Well, hey, guess what!! Some of OPI’s Swiss colors are dupes or near-dupes of China Glaze colors….and the China Glaze colors cost less.

I've purchased just over half of the colors in the Vintage Vixen collection, and bought four of the OPI Swiss colors. Here's what I've been able to confirm with the Mark I eyeball:

1. Glitzerland is nearly the same as Swing Baby (confirmed; Glitzerland is a bit brighter; finish is the same for both polishes)
2. Lucerne-tainly Look Marvelous is the same as Jitterbug (confirmed; same color and finish)
3. Diva of Geneva is nearly the same as Hey Doll (confirmed; same finish, DoG is a little bit brighter than Hey Doll)
4. Cuckoo for this Color is the same as Emerald Fitzgerald (confirmed; same color and finish)

I suspect that Just a little Rösti At This is a near-dupe for Zoya's Sasha; and I think that From A to Z-urich might be a near-match for Riveter Rouge, at least in color (the former is a creme, the latter is a frost.) I don't own many of the China Glaze reds, so if someone can alert me to dupes among the China Glaze lineup, I'll list it here.

So much for OPI's bluster that online promo pics would let other retailers copy their collections. In this case, it looks like the copying got done quite a bit before any promo pics got released to bloggers - and while it's not really possible to say who's duping whom, China Glaze did get the polishes in bloggers' hands by late April or early May, while OPI was only issuing legal threats at that point. So here's two different PR approaches during the same time frame, with similar collections, that had similar release-dates. The fact that OPI is costs almost twice as much as China Glaze, even at full retail, is another footnote/nail in the coffin.

Even though the promo pics of China Glaze appeared earlier than anything about OPI Swiss 2010, I don't think that OPI replicated China Glaze's fall 2010 colors from materials found online. For starters, three weeks is a pretty short turnaround time to mix colors, put together a collection, take the promo pics, and start getting them out to whatever outlets Temptalia originally obtained that promo pic from...so if one of these two companies did consciously build a parallel collection to their competitors', the spying-and-replication happened long before blogs got into the mix. Also, there aren't exact correspondences for all of the colors in each collection (China Glaze's Bogie, First Class Ticket, Ingrid, Classic Camel, Goin' My Way, Midnight Mission; OPI's Color So Hot It Berns, I'm Suzi and I'm a Chocoholic, William Tell Me About OPI, Ski Teal We Drop, Yodel Me On My Cell, The Color to Watch.) I think that while retail-anything is a fast-moving industry, and ideas can and will be swiped and passed down through any available avenue, spurning blogs because "it lets everyone see stuff beforehand and might give competitors an unfair advantage" is patently silly. In this case...it left everyone lemming like mad for Vintage Vixen for -=months=- while we all just kind of...forgot about OPI. And yet, if ideas were indeed somehow passed between the two competitors...it happened long before any blog reveals of the collections.

I think that OPI does have a genuine concern-to-watch, with information leaks and competitors undercutting them in the marketplace. I just doubt that blogs are it. The information is getting out in other ways, and always has been. Some companies are like the music biz folks, who jumped on online piracy as the sole culprit for their demise. Uh...no, not really. People shared music long before we could rip a song to MP3 and shoot it to our friends or put it on a filesharing network - but now the RIAA and their ilk can actually get hard numbers on how often that's happening, so of course "the sky is falling". Same with beauty bloggers: people shared information before about dupes and new collections and product quality; and companies have long had multiple ways to get advance information on what their competitors are doing. Companies can't track those word-of-mouth methods, but they can see evidence of beauty bloggers' influence any day...so naturally, companies will point the finger of blame at the most visible possible source, even if it's the wrong source. British Beauty Blogger put it very well when she said "Previously, they (the brands) sold to us where, when and how they wanted to to maximise their revenue and profile." With online etailers, and now bloggers posting comparison pics every which way, the beauty companies are indeed losing some of that control over how their products are perceived. I'm sure they'll find other ways to assert control, just like we'll find other ways around that control...et cetera, ad nauseum, and the dance will continue.

Meanwhile: anyone got any other dupe-information for the rest of the OPI Swiss 2010 collection?

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