Chinese Replicas of Kickstarter Selfie Stick Sell Before Campaign Ends

Remember StikBox, the selfie stick that folded in a phone case? It was a Kickstarter funded product, about to launch at the end of this summer. Well, before backers had a chance to hold the gadget they supported financially, Chinese replicas started selling like crazy for less than a third of that price. Talk about bad luck #objectmagic

The project was funded with £34,970 ($42.770) on Kickstarter to help the team release the phone case for $47. Well, guess what? China got ahead of them, releasing a copycat with just $8 before the original product could be delivered. In fact, Chinese manufacturers were so fast, they started selling it one week after the campaign launch. Now, you can find a replica for just $6 on Alibaba.com:

As you can imagine, backers were less than happy to realize that they could have gotten the same thing faster and for less money.”You are charging double the price for what the copycats are charging, yet I seriously doubt the final product will be any better than the copycats”, wrote one of them.

In the end, Yekutiel Sherman, the inventor of Stikbox, had to retreat silently, accepting the fact that he had lost “hundreds of thousands” in revenue and much more when it came to his company’s image.