Amazon is well known for its imitation methods, but it is not so often that another company says so, much less in a funny way. But that’s exactly what Peak Design did today when it uploaded a video to YouTube comparing its Everyday Sling to an AmazonBasics camera bag that shares exactly the same name.
“It looks suspiciously like Peak Design Everyday Sling, but you don’t pay for all those unnecessary bells and whistles,” says the video’s narrator. These extras include things like a lifetime warranty, recycled materials approved by BlueSign, as well as the time and effort that the company’s design team invested in creating the bag.
Mostly on the nose spiked on Amazon, the video includes a “dramatization” of how the design team at AmazonBasics created their version for the bag. “Keep combining this data,” says a wide-eyed executive to his subordinate, who is played here by Peak Design founder and CEO Peter Dering. “Let’s give that bad boy the basics,” they say after finding Everyday Sling.
The segment points to an uncomfortable aspect of Amazon’s business model, which a deep Wall Street Journal report examined last year. According to former Amazon employees, the company used proprietary data from vendors to design and price domestic products – although its own policies prohibit it from doing so. The report came when Jeff Bezos had to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives last year, during his antitrust hearings. He said he cannot guarantee that the online retailer has not misused data from its third-party vendors.
Peak Design ends the video with something appealing. If you don’t want a product made responsibly by a small but innovative company, you don’t have to buy it. “Anyone you buy will receive exactly what they paid for.”