ONE SMALL VICTORY

This week a new Urban Outfitters store opened up in Vancouver BC Canada and we were there to protest by handing out pamphlets educating their customers (click left to read the pamphlet). After two days we achieved a small victory when they promised to pull their hijacked LEGALIZE IT t-shirt from the shelves of this location in exchange for us not coming back every day to hand out more pamphlets.

This seems to be the only way to get through to them - the ground roots approach, hitting individual stores and real people instead of their corporate headquarters where we've been virtually stonewalled - so we're going to be handing out these pamphlets in front of the majority of their locations across the United States and Canada over the next few months. If you live in a city that has an Urban Outfitters store in it and you have a couple of hours to spare for the cause, please send an e-mail to urbancounterfeiters@hotmail.com.

We'll be documenting all of the protests here so stay tuned.

URBAN OUTFITTERS FUCKS CROWNFARMER (AGAIN)

Apparently Urban Outfitters wasn't happy with just chopping up old Crownfarmer t-shirts and applying them to other garments (scroll down to one of our first posts about it), so they decided to one-up themselves and blatantly knock off a Michael Leon designed t-shirt that was released by CF back in 2003.

CROWNFARMER (2003):


URBAN OUTFITTERS (2006):




LINK

ESPRIT SPORT VIA 2K VIA JOHN DEERE

From Carl:

"To the left is the original and to the right is Esprit Sport's version.
I've been selling mine since 2001 through 2K.

I intentionally used the John Deere logo (a tractor manufacturer) to take the idea one step further... The connection/contrast between nature and the thundering sound of tractors. The tractors are polluting nature with their toxic farts and the sound they make is what you hear all fucking summer where I grew up... it's "la musique de la nature"... "

TO THE WINDOWS, TO THE WAL'S

I'm sure we don't need to tell you that Wal Mart isn't claiming much but here is a lil thing somebody sent us about how they're rippin some stuff off.

SCAN A BOOK, PUT IT ON A SHOWER CURTAIN

We don't know much about this one but it appears as though the shower curtain bandit is still working for Urban.

H&M JOIN IN THE DOUCHEBAGGERY

Matt Irving is an independent designer based in San Francisco. He's responsible for most of the graphics you've seen on Element skateboards over the past few years as well as most of Stereo Skateboards' graphics. He also does a small side project called Delphi, which H&M decided to fuck over recently. Pictured left is his design, pictured right is the work of the douchebags:

AMERICAN APPAREL'S DOV CHARNEY

This might be old news, but we've been seeing a few too many of those still-creepy American Apparel ads lately and we're not sure... is the founder of American Apparel a douchebag? And why do some of their t-shirts have side seams and others don't? Here, here and here.

URBAN OUTFITTERS DROPS A BOMB ON JOHNNY CUPCAKES

This one's particularly nasty on the part of Urban Outfitters. A while after sending in samples of his t-shirts so that the mega chain might consider buying some off of him to sell in their stores, Johnny Cupcakes was notified by a friend that they were carrying them... without his knowledge. Turns out Urban took a concept off of one of his samples and made their own version.

Here's what the original looked like:



And Urban's "interpretation" of the design:



Legal? Maybe. Shady? Very.

URBAN OUTFITTERS CUTS CROWNFARMER TO PIECES

A couple of years back Crownfarmer sold some controversial t-shirts to Urban Outfitters. Protests outside of UO stores ensued and the t-shirts were pulled off the shelves. A year later Urban made some major modifications to them, re-branding the garments as blazers... without Crownfarmer's knowledge. Would they do this to an Adidas or 55DSL tee that they couldn't sell for one reason or another? We doubt it. There's more info here and here. And here's what Crownfarmer had to say about it.

Here's one of the original Crownfarmer designs:



And Urban's "interpretation" of it:

URBAN OUTFITTERS PULLS PRINCESS TINA'S TOOTH

One of Australian Beci Orpin's designs is a lil' toothy guy. Created by Beci in 2001, it's featured on many of her Princess Tina products and has become the company's logo. Last year Urban Outfitters took Toothy and put him onto a shower curtain to be sold all across America... without her knowledge.

Here are a couple of samples of Princess Tina's Toothy:





And Urban's "interpretation" of it:



Inspiration or downright thievery?