Iconic Dupe started online. For its latest chapter, OMHU brought the idea into the real world, teaming up with Office Magazine for a lookalike contest off Canal Street, an area synonymous with New York’s counterfeit trade.
Five knockoffs. Only one original.
Iconic Dupe started online. For its latest chapter, OMHU brought the idea into the real world, teaming up with Office Magazine for a lookalike contest off Canal Street, an area synonymous with New York’s counterfeit trade.
The premise was simple: put the ‘dupe-version’ original TEDY™ sofa up against five real knockoffs and see if New York could tell the difference.
Lookalike contests have become an unlikely fixture of internet culture. This one followed the same format, except the contestants were sofas.
Inside LUME Studios, one original TEDY™ sat alongside five knockoffs sourced online. No helpful labels, only numbers. Guests were invited to sit, squeeze, inspect and compare before voting for the one they believed was the original.
Online, similarities can be convincing. In real life, the differences are harder to hide.
Guests from across fashion, design, media and New York’s creative community took their judging duties surprisingly seriously. Armed with ranking cards, clipboards and measuring tapes, they compared fabrics, seams, shapes and comfort before casting their votes.
The results were mixed, which was partly the point. But when the votes were counted, the majority had correctly identified TEDY™ as the original.
Another surprise: a lot of people already knew the campaMany guests already knew about Iconic Dupe before they arrived. Some had seen the campaign directly; others had encountered it through creators, friends and reposts.
For a campaign built around the way ideas and imitations spread online, it felt appropriate. Iconic Dupe had started with copies of TEDDY™ circulating across the internet. Now the campaign itself was doing the same.ign before they walked in. Some had seen it through friends, creators and reposts rather than from us directly. The internet had done its thing.
TEDDY™ is one of the most copied sofas on the internet. Rather than simply fight the knockoffs, OMHU created TEDY™, its own limited-edition ‘dupe-version’ original, and sold it on the same marketplaces as the copies.
The lookalike contest took the idea one step further. If two sofas can look almost identical online, what separates the original in real life?
Appearance is only part of the answer. Materials, construction, comfort, proportions and finish are harder to reproduce in a thumbnail and easier to understand when you can actually sit on them.
Office Magazine helped turn the experiment into a night out, with six sofas, voting cards, campaign visuals, music, drinks and food filling the space.
Miles Mitchell, winner of New York’s viral Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest and one of Iconic Dupe’s ‘dupefluencers’, was there to announce the result alongside Office Magazine Editor in Chief Simon Rasmussen. A lookalike contest winner crowning the winner of a sofa lookalike contest felt appropriately full circle.
The event even drew people in from the street, while conversations inside moved beyond the sofas to wider questions around dupes, originals and why people choose one over the other.
The windows did some work too. People stopped on the street, looked in and asked if they could come inside. Some of them were not even invited. Fair enough. Apparently we should have invited more people.
The best part was watching people actually talk about the thing the campaign was built around. We also asked guests about dupe culture, originals, copies and why anyone pays more for the real thing. The answers were not all the same. Which is exactly why the conversation is interesting.
Much better questions over a drink than in a comment section.
Some people spotted TEDY™ immediately, others didn’t, that uncertainty was exactly what made the experiment interesting.
Online, a copy can get remarkably close. In person, the differences become harder to ignore. A silhouette can be copied. So can a colour. But a product is also everything behind the way it looks: how it is made, what it is made from and how it feels to live with.
There is still only one original.
TEDDY™ by OMHU.
