Easy methods to Inform if Your Scrub Daddy Sponge is a Counterfeit

After housesitting for me a number of months in the past, my mother gifted me a pack of Scrub Daddies — these traditional sponges within the form of a smiley face which can be identified for his or her capacity to scour nearly something — or at the very least she thought she did. 

What she truly gave me was a pack of knockoff sponges with a frustratingly stiff texture that disintegrated after a single run within the dishwasher. And it seems I’m not the one one with this expertise.

Like many different fashionable kitchen merchandise, the Scrub Daddy has impressed numerous dupes. However not all Scrub Daddy duplicates are the identical. These recreations may be divided into two classes: the extra benign knockoffs and the counterfeits which can be deceiving shoppers.

Like a pretend Louis Vuitton bag with a distorted emblem throughout it, knockoffs are pretty straightforward to establish. Food market-brand scrubbers, for instance, could change the form of the eyes or mouth on the signature smiley face. Some knockoffs could seem shocked (like this sponge from Publix) as an alternative of joyful, whereas others have enjoyable shapes for eyes as an alternative of circles. In brief, it’s straightforward to differentiate the distinction and choose out of buying the merchandise when you don’t desire a knockoff.

Whereas these rivals are irritating, Scrub Daddy has found a far greater difficulty: counterfeiters who’re manufacturing Scrub Daddy merchandise and packaging with an almost equivalent look. To many shopper eyes, these sponges can appear precisely like a real Scrub Daddy till they fail to carry out whereas washing dishes.

On-line retailers could fail to differentiate between genuine and counterfeit Scrub Daddies, and many shoppers stay unaware that they’re shopping for off-brand merchandise when ordering from an internet site. The result’s dissatisfied customers who imagine they’ve bought the true deal and that the product is flawed.

A short dive into Reddit reveals a lot of first-hand accounts from upset prospects, a few of whom have despatched their inferior merchandise to Scrub Daddy solely to study that they’re fakes. One person posed the query “Is there a cause my model new Scrub Daddy disintegrated after one use?” together with a photograph of remnants of the sponge. One other shared a side-by-side video evaluating two totally different Scrub Daddy purchases and questioning why the supplies didn’t appear to be the identical in each sponges.

Chief government officer of Scrub Daddy Aaron Krause says he’s issued professional Scrub Daddy merchandise to duped prospects without charge. Thus far, he estimates replacements have solely value the corporate lots of of {dollars}, however Krause is extra involved with injury to the model’s fame than the value of changing merchandise — particularly when so many shoppers aren’t conscious they’ve purchased a pretend. 

It was buyer complaints like these and rising worries over injury to the product’s good identify that alerted Scrub Daddy to the presence of counterfeit producers.

“We had been seeing cases on-line and listening to from prospects that they thought they purchased a pretend,” Krause recollects. “We used the knowledge from the place they bought to ship in a personal investigator with a hidden digital camera and caught them red-handed.”

Scrub Daddy was in a position to raid the producer, a manufacturing unit situated in Southern China, and confiscate the counterfeit sponges on-site. “All infringing supplies… will now be proof and we’ve initiated a lawsuit towards the corporate and its house owners,” Krause says. However that is solely the tip of the iceberg, and the model is already conscious of at the very least two extra counterfeit operations in China. 

The merchandise seized from the Shenzhen producer underscore simply how near the unique Scrub Daddy a counterfeit can seem.

The recovered sponges’ emblem is almost equivalent to Scrub Daddy’s, with an alteration so refined it’s not perceptible to most shoppers. On this case, it’s the kerning — spacing between particular person letters — across the capital “S” in “Scrub” and lowercase “a” in “Daddy.” 

For somebody who isn’t a typography knowledgeable, the strongest giveaway for the counterfeit producer in query is the field. Real containers keep a vivid citrus shade generally known as 804 orange, whereas the counterfeiter’s containers have a barely diluted hue as compared.

Counterfeit merchandise vary from roughly half of Scrub Daddy’s instructed retail value to a precise match in value. The difficulty, after all, is that prospects are paying for considerably decrease high quality. 

“There’s just one firm on this planet that may make Scrub Daddy materials and it’s proper right here in the US,” Krause emphasizes.

Inside analysis evaluating real and counterfeit Scrub Daddies highlights a number of the frequent points prospects are going through. Some issues are minor however nonetheless irritating, equivalent to product longevity. A pretend sponge will begin falling aside if it goes by only a few rounds in a dishwasher — and sure, you must have the ability to wash a Scrub Daddy within the dishwasher — whereas the true factor, with correct care, can final upwards of 10 runs.

Different points are much more regarding, just like the composition of those pretend sponges. “Primarily based on the descriptions utilized by the counterfeiters on their itemizing, the frequent supplies that they’re utilizing are polyurethane and polyether,” a consultant from Scrub Daddy explains in an e-mail. “There’s a large threat of contamination and publicity to many hazards, some being biohazards, attributable to unregulated producer amenities.” 

Krause and Scrub Daddy’s chief of technique, Will Augmenbraun, are taking measures to thwart present and future counterfeiters, beginning with suing the counterfeit producer they’ve recognized to date. Nevertheless, for now, their finest plan of action is to make sure that shoppers are knowledgeable concerning the difficulty.

Krause says the one technique to know you’re buying a real Scrub Daddy product on-line is to get one straight from the supply: the corporate’s Smileshop. “In the end we’re about our prospects they usually received screwed,” Krause says. “And in the long run, if we make them conscious of that, they’ll be smarter, they’ll be extra educated shoppers, they usually’ll be extra cautious about the place they store.”