This article was inspired by a video from Taylor Bell, a YouTuber who spent time examining Quince, the California-based e-commerce company quietly irritating the luxury fashion world.
The premise of her video: Is it possible to get a USD 50 cashmere sweater that has the same quality as a USD 400 one?
Sid Gupta, the co-founder and CEO of Quince, says yes.
The Dupe Goes Mainstream
Quince is not a new idea. As Jason Stoffer points out, the tradition goes back to Sears Roebuck and runs through Walmart, Costco, TJX, H&M, Zara, and Shein. What is new is the attitude around it.
Dupes used to carry a stigma. You bought one because you could not afford the real thing and kept quiet about it. Things have changed. Last Christmas season, 82 percent of Gen Z consumers said they planned to purchase dupes, according to a PwC survey.
Quince’s model is straightforward. It contracts with the same factories that produce for established luxury labels and sells the output without the brand markup. No logo. No boutique on the Champs-Élysées. No celebrity campaign shot in the Maldives. You pay for the object, not the story.
The USD 50 cashmere sweater that launched Quince into the spotlight? Made in the same supply chain as the USD 400 version from the brand next door. The company reportedly doubled its revenue in 2024 to around USD 675-700 million and is approaching a USD 2 billion run rate.
A Fair Hearing for the Other Side
The argument against Quince deserves to be heard before we move on.
Luxury brands invest in design, craft, heritage, and identity. They take risks on new aesthetics, train artisans, and build communities of meaning around their products. Quince turns up, copies the silhouette and vibe, and sells the result for a fraction of the price. Why should anyone invest in creativity if a willing factory can replicate the output in six months?
It is a legitimate tension. Intellectual property exists because society decided that creative effort needs protection to remain worthwhile. The fact that fashion enjoys weaker IP protections than pharmaceuticals or software is a deliberate legal choice. Courts have long resisted locking up silhouettes and color palettes. But the underlying concern is real.
Nobody wants a world where the incentive to innovate quietly disappears.
But Let’s Also Look at the Prices
There is, however, a considerable distance between a legitimate concern about copying and a defense of pricing that has, by any reasonable measure, become detached from the cost of the underlying product.
The Chanel Classic Flap, which cost USD 2,200 in 2010, now runs north of USD 10,000. Premium mid-market cashmere that once felt like a manageable splurge now costs USD 300, USD 400, or more. As The Business of Fashion Podcast has put it, luxury brands “have exponentially raised their prices for hip products in a way that is locking out middle-class shoppers who typically could splurge on a few nice bags or a few nice sweaters a year.”
At some point, this stops being about quality and starts being about exclusion as a product feature. That is a business strategy, not a moral position. Competition is the appropriate response.
The Market Working as Designed
What does competition actually do here? When a USD 50 sweater reveals that a USD 400 sweater contains perhaps USD 50 of material and USD 350 of signaling costs, that is useful information for a consumer. It does not mean the signaling costs are illegitimate; it means the consumer is better equipped to decide what they actually value.
That is consumer sovereignty in action, and it is not supposed to be comfortable for sellers.
Quince is not selling counterfeits with fake logos. It is selling objects that resemble other objects, without claiming to be those objects. The legal distinction matters, and so does the ethical one.
The brands targeted by Quince have responded in ways that tell us something. Some doubled down on exclusivity, keeping prices moving upward. Others have done something more interesting: they invested in what you might call dupe-proofing. White + Warren, whose cashmere crewnecks can cost more than USD 400 compared to Quince’s USD 50, launched a sweater embroidered with sardines. It became a fast bestseller, pushing their average order value up more than 30 percent.
Kant’s Forest, Again
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it in his famous metaphor:
“It is just the same as with trees in a forest; exactly because each one attempts to deprive the other of air and sunlight, each compels the other to seek these things above itself, and by this means they grow beautiful and straight; whereas those that put out branches at will, in freedom and in isolation from others, grow stunted, bent and twisted.”
Luxury brands with no serious competition had been growing stunted and twisted. Quince is the neighbor tree.
That is the market working. Not failing, working.
Gen Z Meets Competitive Capitalism
Gen Z has been caricatured, depending on who you ask, as either idealistic socialists suspicious of markets or narcissistic consumers obsessed with status. The dupe moment suggests something more mundane and more interesting. They learned to comparison-shop at scale. Then they drew their own conclusions about where value actually lives.
According to PwC, Gen Z cut overall spending by 13 percent between January and April 2025, particularly in apparel, accessories, and electronics. Yet they still planned to spend an average of USD 1,357 for the Christmas season. Instead of rejecting capitalism, they are getting better at it.
* Federico N. Fernández is a visionary leader dedicated to driving innovation and change. As the CEO of We Are Innovation, a global network of over 50 think tanks and NGOs, Federico champions innovative solutions worldwide. His expertise and passion for innovation have earned him recognition from prestigious publications such as The Economist, El País, Folha de São Paulo, and Newsweek. Federico has also delivered inspiring speeches and lectures across four continents, authored numerous scholarly articles, and co-edited several books on economics.
Source: We Are Innovation
