.JPG)
I strangely feel like I am a 14 year old again today and holding Granny to ransom with a plastic gun, but really meaning it. Although she's not holding a copy of today's newspaper just these photographs. If you happened to be around Bond st. recently here in London, you may have seen the latest scheme from Dorothy Perkins (as of 12th September 2010 although discount posters have also now been hung in their windows ). I seem to be covering so many look-a-like schemes recently and as lookie likee schemes go, this is one hell of a corker. In Summer 2009, the value retailer, Splash (think Primark Prices, New Look fashionability) based in Dubai, UAE, installed a scheme (two of the images sent to me can be seen below although I have quite a few other views of the scheme too) using out sized 'Polaroids' suspended from ropes with clips. Just 12 months later Dorothy Perkins here in London (and no doubt a version of this went around all of the branches) launched a scheme of out sized 'Polaroids' clipped and suspended from a wire. Purely innocent coincidence? a scheme 'influenced' by Splash? or completely shameless plagiarism? I know what I think but will let you decide. Having worked for many years with the umbrella company myself, I do feel that, at least, from my frame of reference, the latter probably applies - I may be wrong (yeah right) but I just cant convince myself enough to believe this is coincidence, and I bet you cant either?. Who would have thought that Dorothy Perkins would ever be (hypothetically) well and truly busted and exposed for reproducing a scheme first seen in a value retailer? Its a bit like Prada stealing concepts from New Look - OK not quite. We are savvy enough to know it wouldn't happen but if it did we would wonder why, right? Wouldn't it be quite desperate? I've always felt DP's (as they're known in the biz.) was the kind of granny-ish brand that catered for suburban housewives married to guys (possibly called Brian or Ralph) who work as telephone sanitisers or sell air conditioning units and who bore their wives stupid with the In's and outs of the benefits of compressor fans rather than the ageing Topshop thirty somethings that I think its actually aimed at? But that's just me. Ultimately, this is quite painful-buttock-clenching-toe-curling-stuff, pretty shameful and shameless behaviour. If they had asked me I could have told them it has been done before - but they didn't, although I suspect and from my experience that they already knew anyway. In the meantime, stick 'em up Granny-ish brand you are so busted.
Splash Images, Courtesy and Copyright John Paul Cairney & Jensen Galiza
