It’s early January 2017. The Fidget Cube still hasn’t shipped. They’ve mentioned delays in their backer emails due to manufacturing problems with quality. Not a big deal. Par for the course as far as I’m concerned when it comes to crowdfunded products as these things are very hard to predict, and I care about quality.

I happen to find myself in Shenzhen, China: the hardware manufacturing capital of the world. I’ve been considering manufacturing my own products, so I went to meet a few people, learn about the ecosystem, and see how feasible designing and manufacturing my own product really is.

A great documentary by Wired to learn about Shenzhen if you’re curious.

The heart of Shenzhen is the electronics market area called Huaqiangbei. You can buy almost anything there. A huge swath of what you see on Amazon like headphones, smartphone accessories, and more can be found there for a third to a quarter of the price. I’ll never look at electronics the same ever again, cost wise.

Imagine my surprise when I reach a floor to find almost every store there selling fidget cubes. Every other wall was filled with them. Not just normal fidget cubes, but even 12 sided monstrosities.

Taken from my Instagram: instagram.com/jobosapien

Weird 12 sided version that I saw (and is now also on Amazon)

Dafuq? The Fidget Cube campaign did mention copycats, but I didn’t realize it was this egregious.

I asked a store how much they were: 12 RMB, a bit less than $2 USD. I bought 5 to give to friends.

What you have to understand is that China is very good at quickly and cheaply manufacturing almost any good you can think of, especially if it’s a simple product with no internal circuitry or associated software, which the Fidget Cube falls under. However, the quality is typically lacking and they aren’t good at thinking of their own ideas so the second they see high demand for any new product they will copy it as quickly as possible. It’s one of the downsides of public crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Capitalism at its finest.

Other famous quickly copied crowdfunding campaigns: Stikbox and 3Doodler

It’s hard to defend against this. China rarely respects patents or trademark laws. The people I met in Shenzhen had too many stories to count of copycats, essentially saying it’s hard to avoid unless you have an extremely good relationship with the factory.

I then discovered that one of the potential reasons for these Fidget Cube knockoffs was “Jack.” He saw the successful Kickstarter campaign and because he was already a veteran at copying products he was able to manufacture and start shipping knockoffs sooner than Fidget Cube themselves, generating over $345k from a $70k investment within 2 months.

I’m not sure what came first: the factories noticing themselves this was a hot product on Kickstarter and then making it, or “Jack” asking the factories to produce them who then turned around and sold it to distributors everywhere.

Regardless, the speed at which it happened is astonishing.