Everything started with the Israeli entrepreneur, Yekutiel Sherman, who had spent one year designing a smartphone case, that unfolds into a selfie stick, called Stikbox. He had drawn up prototypes, secured some minimal funds from his family and launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Yet, one week after his product hit Kickstarter in December 2015, Sherman was shocked to see it for sale on AliExpress – Alibaba’s English-language wholesale site.
Vendors across China were selling identical smartphone case selfie-sticks, using the same design Sherman came up with himself. Sherman was shocked to realize that the vendors were selling an exact copy of his product. Worse, they priced them for as low as $8 each, while his product was set at $47.41.
Sherman had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats. Before he had even found a factory to make his new product, manufacturers in China had spied his idea online, and beaten him to the punch. Sherman’s backers went into backlash, accusing him of cheating on pricing. The project, however, was still able to raise $43,000 from its initial goal of $40,600 goal.
