Thread by @dan_abramov

I was asking about LED lamps a few days ago. A few people linked to “Kōnā Floor Lamp” by “Noxu Design”.

DO NOY BUY THOSE. Noxu Design is a scam company. I bought their shitty lamp and that’s what led me to asking in the first place!

Here’s a small thread about how they operate.

Noxu Design is one of those companies that come up if you search for “LED lamp” or “corner lamp”. If you visit their website and don’t look closely, it might even look legit. But there are red flags everywhere! Can you spot them?

Red flag number one: they claim to be “award-winning” but there’s no mention of what award they refer to.

“Noxu by Norita Xudia.”

Who the fuck is Norita Xudia? Perhaps, a designer? No, it’s a fake person with 10 google results. This lamp must be their life’s work!

Red flag number two: watermarks everywhere.

If you were an actual design and manufacturing shop, would you put ugly watermarks over every image?

Noxu Design is so good at protecting against copycats because they *are* one of those copycats.

Let’s take Noxu Design’s homepage picture and use Google reverse image search. The lamp Noxu Design is selling for $200 is sold on AliExpress for $70. In fact, that’s where they’re getting them from in the first place!

So what is Noxu Design, then? It’s a brand designed to resell low-quality items with high-end prices. It’s just one of the many brands they set up. Enter “Leex Design”, a supposedly French manufacturer selling the same items. They didn’t even bother tweaking the template.

The most hilarious thing about Noxu Design is that they share the brand with a London-based @NOXU_DESIGN web design studio that stopped tweeting in 2018. It’s even the same domain!

Did the web studio just find a better business model and move to scams? Guess we’ll never know.

Here is a funny detail. Notice how Noxu Design pretends like their remote control has their branding. However, that label is photoshopped onto the picture. If you search for this picture, you’ll find “GoldDesign”, “OIO Design”, “APEX”, and other brands photoshopped the same way.

So how did this super scammy company get ahead? They nailed SEO and social media advertising. Here’s a thread about it from someone who looked at it earlier:

https://twitter.com/thecalebchin/status/1343424360170876928

Now, a little bit about my experience with their products. They’re absolute shit. I bought two lamps and they worked well for a week, after which both broke down completely. Of course, it’s clear now they can’t troubleshoot them because they’re not the actual manufacturer.

Luckily, I bought one of them from Amazon, and so I got a refund (but only after writing a bad review:

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1367873205516533761

). The one I bought from them — they are refusing to refund until I return it and they collect it. But I doubt that I can actually count on them doing it.

I wonder if anyone knows if there’s anywhere I can complain about them refusing to refund a faulty item until collection? I don’t really know the UK laws in this area. If they don’t refund after that, what do I do?

The silver lining in this story is that the Noxu Design scam is only targeting people who can afford to buy an expensive shitty lamp. So at least they’re preying on idiots like me and not on people who are in need.

Still, hope more people become aware of this scam!

9x margins!

https://twitter.com/jhrtn/status/1367900550717710343

I’ll pin this thread out of spite. Will unpin when I see a refund 😅

Hahaha it looks like @Shopify literally encourages people to set up stores that do this. Looool shopify.co.uk/blog/dropshipp…

I guess the model itself is fine, as long as you don’t accidentally lie on your homepage about where your product is designed and manufactured