A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to Vietnam with a North Face jacket that she got for $20 and change. But it’s all completely legit, she says. Supposedly, there’s a law that a certain percentage of apparel manufactured for export must be sold domestically, at great discounts. And that’s not just the yarn the street vendor spun, she claims she read it in the guide book, too.
Is this as bogus as I think it is?
Yes, it’s counterfeit. There’s tons of crappy knock-offs in SE Asia, I saw lots of it in Thailand. Some might be made on the same assembly lines and “dropped off a truck” but the majority of it is pretty easy to tell from the real stuff. The stitching is usually poor and the logo is almost never right.
I heard the same thing when I was in China a few years ago, where I found $150 North Face jackets selling for $25-$30. My guess is that these jackets are made locally and that manufacturers sell what’s left to the locals (or mostly tourists).
Think about how much these jackets cost to make in China and $25 is actually a pretty fair price…
Don’t you think I know a genuine Magnetbox when I see one? And look, there’s Panaphonics and Sorny!
I got a great price on an Onega watch!
Another possubilty (and imo more likely than your friend’s story) is that her jacket is a legit-bootleg. The factories are supposed to deliver X number of Nike, Northface, whatever, and then after they meet their contract, they are already tooled to produce those garments, so they run off a few ten thousand unliscensed garments for themselves. Exactly tge same as a real one but still unliscensed.
But there are also plenty of fakes of various quality all over asia…
Most brands enact harsh penalties against any manufacturer who does a unauthorized run. I’m not saying it’s never done because, when you can get away with it, the profits are huge but it’s definitely something manufacturers are not happy about.
I’ve never heard of such a law, but then I’m not all that up on the Vietnamese legal system. There are such things as original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs), in which manufacturing is farmed out to local producers in places like Vietnam and Thailand. Often they are allowed to manufacture the same-quality product under their own brand for domestic sale. These are cheaper, but it’s always under their own local brand, never the internationally known export brand. And it could be that there are real places selling the real thing for cheaper due to the lack of transport costs and import duties etc, but these are never street vendors, but rather department stores and the like. For instance, I really can buy genuine Levi’s and Lee jeans in department stores here in Bangkok for cheaper than they’re sold in the West, but the street vendors all have counterfeit stuff.
It’s common enough in China that expats call it “the North Fake.”
In Southeast Asia there is a huge market for what they will admit to calling “quality imitations” (or something like that). They have a brand label slapped on an item that is actually a high quality product. The stitching is excellent, the zippers are high quality and the material is basically the same as the stuff in that is exported to be sold at 5 to 10 times the price. Sometimes the same item, maybe with a color difference, will have two different designer labels. Yet, the quality is very good.
It used to be that the knock-offs were low quality. In many cases that has changed if you know what you are looking for.
Yes, buyer beware, but you can get some excellent quality products at a fraction of the price that a product of the same quality would be sold for in North America. It gives you some idea of the markup on some of this stuff.
Thanks y’all! Apparently it’s not as clear cut as I thought. Interesting stuff.
Granted I haven’t been to Vietnam, and my experience in Thailand is about 5 years old, but all the stuff I saw with The North Face or Patagonia labels was clearly inferior knock offs. Some places sold the real stuff and it was priced vaguely in line with Western stores. You could also get legitimate used gear in many place with prices varying according to proximity to trekking.
But there were no super great deals on real gear. Nearly everything was poorly made if you knew where to look on the garment.
Dunno about Canada but bringing it into the US would be perfectly OK. Trying to enter the US with more than one, or one intended for someone other than the traveller, would be a problem.
In the Philippines there are markets where you must assume every single namebrand you find is a knockoff or else you will be over-paying… in fact, I wouldn’t buy name brand items where I cared if it was authentic in asia unless I was shopping at that company’s store to be honest.
But even among knockoffs there is a VAST array of quality levels, up to and including just as high quality as legitimate brand name goods (when I see these I assume they’re probably unofficial knockoffs by the same factories that do the legit stuff). I have a Philippine flag jacket that costed around 18$ US, the legit Adidas one costs around $90. The quality is not 100% of the real one, but it’s good enough and no one can tell it is fake from the outside, it is the stitching inside where the quality lacks.
Until The North Face ran them out of business, my preference was for The South Butt.
I bought a North Fake waterproof bag in Nepal for like $20 and it’s superb. Really well made and does the job, except for sub-standard zipper pulls which got a bit deformed in the hold of a plane (but I bent them back with pliers). I wonder if it is actually surplus from a genuine factory and someone else put the zippers on.
Taking the North Face brand as an example, there’s both real and fake. There is a genuine North Face shop here in Bangkok, located in Siam Discovery Center. And genuine North Face products in, say, Paragon Department Store’s camping section. But if you seem them in the Patpong Night Bazaar? Forget it.
Knock-offs may look good, but the experience I have had is that they usually se cheap harware (like zippers and clasps) that break soon. One chinese-make POS knapsack i had ripped (the material was cheap and thin).
I’d avoid them.