A Toronto small business owner said she was initially “dazzled” when Urban Outfitters reached out to buy a shipment of her popular orange produce bag charms to sell on the retailer’s website.
But months after the wholesale purchase deal fell through, Dina Baxevanakis was shocked to find Urban Outfitters listed a product for sale that bore a striking resemblance to her design.
“I thought I was dreaming,” Baxevanakis told TorontoToday of the moment she saw Urban Outfitters’ “Fruit Mesh Sack Keychain” for sale.
“This is a very, very scary thing to happen to a small business.”
According to previous media reports, this is not the first time Urban Outfitters has faced backlash for allegedly ripping off an artists’ designs.
TorontoToday spoke to experts who say cases like this are all too common in the art world as more artists turn to social media and the Internet to market their work.
Urban Outfitters did not respond to multiple emails sent by TorontoToday. The retailer has similarly not responded to other media outlets on separate allegations of copyright infringement.
‘It felt violating’
For years, Baxevanakis’ business, Shop Velanidi, was a one-woman show. Baxevanakis started the polymer clay jewelry business in 2020 after graduating from OCAD.
Her “Orange Produce Bag” charms went viral on TikTok in late 2020, and now her shop specializes in making charms and earrings of miniature clay fruits and vegetables held together in mesh produce bags. She hand sculpts each fruit out of clay, paints them, then hand stitches the mesh bags out of recycled materials.
“It is a very long, painstaking process,” she said.
This year, Baxevanakis was able to hire a part-time studio assistant to help with the workload. But even still, when Baxevanakis restocks her website with new charms and earrings, they almost immediately sell out — “a very good problem to have,” she notes.
On January 22, an associate buyer at Urban Outfitters reached out to Baxevanakis for a bulk purchase of her bag charms, according to emails Baxevanakis shared with TorontoToday.
The emails show the buyer and Baxevanakis were in the process of inking a wholesale deal for 100-200 units to sell on the Urban Outfitters website, when the issue of price seemed to cause the deal to fall through.
At the time, Baxevanakis was selling her charms for $30 and she was only willing to give Urban Outfitters a 20 per cent discount on each unit — otherwise she’d be losing money on the deal, she said. The associate buyer told her Urban Outfitters needed a 50 per cent discount at the minimum.
“And then I was ghosted,” Baxevanakis said.
Baxevanakis said some of her friends and family were worried Urban Outfitters would take the OCAD grad’s design and make its own version, but she believed the company wouldn’t.
“They talked to me. They wouldn't go behind my back and do anything,” she said she had thought at the time.
Months later, in December, one of Baxevanakis’ friends sent her a screenshot from the Urban Outfitters website of a “Fruit Mesh Sack Keychain.”
“It felt violating,” Baxevanakis said. “My produce bags are my business. It's what we're known for.”
Baxevanakis said she couldn’t prove Urban Outfitters copied her design, but the initial interest in purchasing her charms made her feel the situation was “sinister.”
“This is a company that’s able to mass manufacture probably 1000s of units at a time, how can I compete with that? I have myself, I have my studio assistant, and I have my bunny helping me here, that's it,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, my business is done.’”
Shop Velanidi has over 30,000 followers on TikTok, so Baxevanakis took to her platform to speak out.
At first, she worried about drawing attention to Urban Outfitters’ $8 orange produce bag charms because her charms are so often out of stock, and are sold for $35. But instead of buying the $8 charm, Baxevanakis’ followers flooded the product listing with one-star reviews accusing the retailer of ripping her off, she said.
The day after Baxevanakis posted her TikTok about the incident, the “Fruit Mesh Sack Keychain” was quietly taken off the Urban Outfitters website. TorontoToday was able to screenshot product photos of the listing that were cached on Google Images.
“I didn't even have to do anything myself, it was just my audience,” Baxevanakis said. “I was so overwhelmed and grateful.”
But the experience left Baxevanakis reflecting on the artists that don’t have as large a following as she does.
“There are so many artists that this happens to,” she said. “Where’s their community that's going to fight for them? They’re a perfect target for a big corporation.”
In 2020, an artist from Hamilton, Ontario, accused Urban Outfitters of a similar scheme. The Canadian Press reported that Lee Meszaros alleged the retailer reached out to her for a partnership on a line of floral resin goods.
According to the story, Meszaros sent Urban Outfitters a sample order but the retailer decided to pull the plug on the partnership because the items cost too much. Months later, products resembling Meszaros’ designs were up on the Urban Outfitters website for sale.
Meszaros went public with her concerns and Urban Outfitters took down the products.
In 2017, Urban Outfitters was ordered to pay US$530,000 by a U.S. federal judge for infringing on the copyright of a small fabric designer in Los Angeles.
Urban Outfitters has faced further allegations of copying from a vase designer in Bristol, U.K, a Detroit textile artist, and a Chicago jewelery maker.
‘A David and Goliath kind of fight’
Baxevanakis hasn’t decided if she wants to reach out to an intellectual property lawyer about this case because copyright and trademarks are “notoriously very difficult to protect,” she said.
According to lawyer Nelson Godfrey, a partner at Gowling WLG and national head of the firm’s trademark practice, Baxevanakis’ case lies at the intersection of various areas of the law and could be difficult to argue before a court.
When an artist creates an original work, it is automatically protected under copyright law, he said. But, when a copyright owner reproduces that artistic work more than 50 times, “then copyright is typically unenforceable,” he said.
“The reason for that is because copyright then interacts with another type of law called the Industrial Design Act,” he said, which requires artists to register their design in order to have exclusive rights to it.
Because Baxevanakis has sold more than 50 units of her design, she could try to argue she has a trademark to this charm, but that would require a “high evidentiary bar,” Godfrey said.
Baxevanakis would have to prove that she has significant "reputation and goodwill” in the charm market in order for her design to be recognized as a trademark, he said.
Kathryn Adams, an illustrator who teaches art business classes at OCAD — and taught Baxevanakis when she was a student — told TorontoToday that Canada’s intellectual property laws are “not keeping up with technology,” and artists are the ones that suffer. In the digital age, it’s now easier than ever to rip off artistic designs, she said.
“If it's sitting there on the net… why would you hire designers and pay them? You can just look stuff up online and take it and just hope nobody notices,” Adams said.
“They do it because they can. It’s an incredibly costly business to take on big multinational corporations who steal other people’s intellectual property,” she added. “It's a David and Goliath kind of fight.”
Adams has been an illustrator for over 40 years and she had a brush with copyright infringement when a German website took one of her illustrations and used it to promote a construction project, she said. She ended up having to send a cease and desist letter in German to get the illustration removed.
She recommends artists going through similar experiences to only use legal action as a last resort, because of how expensive it is — and instead recommends sending a cease and desist letter or trying to drum up public outrage, like Baxevanakis did.
As for Baxevanakis, she’s urging Torontonians to vote with their dollars and not support businesses that have histories of copyright infringement allegations.
“Support small businesses whenever you can,” she said.
“Right now more than ever, the little guys need your help and that’s basically the only way to fight this.”
