“And this is what the state of hip-hop is like,
I'm thinkin', "Damn, this cannot be right"
And I agree that everybody's a biter, but if you Xerox the style,
Then that's infringin' on my copy, right?”
- Phonte of Little Brother, “We Got Now” (2005)
When the first Nugget emerged back in 2014, it was the only one of its kind. There was one company you could buy it from: Nugget. A few years later, in 2018, that was still the case. But a lot has changed in two years — dig into the world of kids furniture today, and a veritable surfeit of fake “Nuggets” (a.k.a. Fuggets) are ready to ensconce you in their soft, foamy embrace.
Canadian Nuggets. Mexican Nuggets. Straight-from-China Nuggets (you’ll need to order at least 50-100, in that case, and arrange shipping via trans-pacific freight container). Nuggets with slight tweaks or feature changes from the Nugget®-brand version of Nugget. Nuggets with no material changes or updates at all — complete (albeit lower-quality) duplicates.
To be clear, none of these are actual Nuggets — that is, they are not assembled in our Butner, NC factory, nor are they created using materials from our suppliers. They are, instead, part of a nascent but fast-growing industry of Nugget look-alike products, purchased and sold all over the globe, whose purveyors range from predatory fraudsters, to parental side-projects, to legitimate new startups. And more crop up every week.
In this era of widespread Nugget-biting, a few thoughts come to mind that I wanted to share. In the interest of the Field Notes style of expediency over excellency, I’ll quickly catalog some of them here:
Look what we did. It’s easy to jump into “how do we respond?” mode, but a moment of reflection is warranted here. As most business types will tell you, few things are harder to find than a hero product that can carry an entire company for years on end. Many of the most successful brands in the world, names we all know, were built on the back of a single hero product that defined a category. Is the Nugget insulated from competitive forces because it was first? No. Will the product need to keep advancing and updating to remain competitive? Definitely. But I’d say we’re off to a good start. Extending the Nugget product line represents a significant next hurdle in the trajectory of the company, but for now it’s worth stating (and celebrating) the obvious: the Nugget has been a game-changing product, in a way that products rarely are.
What do we do now? Perhaps it’s distinctly a marketer’s view of the world to see mass duplication of a hero product as a good thing, rather than an imminent disaster, a mortal threat to our market position or revenues, a silver platter for litigation, or an enraging case of dirty-rotten-no-good stealing. In such a circumstance, it becomes the marketer’s role (that would be me) to assure everyone on board that no, the sky is not falling, it’s OK to not have 100% market share, and that a little company named Coca-Cola has been finding a lot of success for quite some time despite everyone in the world knowing what they make and more or less how they make it.
So no — we aren’t the only makers of play couches anymore. Those things we invented? You can now buy them, or facsimiles of them, from places other than Nugget. My official stance? I think we’ll be fine.
Still, questions remain about the “Nugget” copycat movement and whether it bears mention from Nugget Comfort LLC. Is this something we explicitly reference in our marketing? Is it alluded to? Or should the category-leader cruise above it all, telling its own brand narrative rather than addressing copycats, under the assumption that it has better things to talk about, and that copying happens to all great products eventually? (Also: Is it a bad idea for someone at the company to write a blog post hyperlinking to all the copycats in the second paragraph?) These are the questions asked by a company in its first experience with a knocked-off product.
The Big Picture. As much as my marketing brain tells me mass reproduction of our product (along with a copying of our voice and copy) is the mark of a product/brand breakthrough, my human brain tells me that this is one of many illuminating examples of the underlying failures of our economic system. Market fundamentalists tell us that free-market capitalism is the most efficient system for producing and distributing goods, but how does it account for the waste (both of goods, and of peoples’ time) created in a situation like this?
Currently, the “market” understands that a lot of people want these couches, and that Nugget can’t currently serve them all, so a flood of replicas is rushing into the market to fill the void. But just like actual Nuggets, there’s a limit to how fast these duplicates can be created — weeks or months of time before they’ll be arriving to the bulk of their customers in North America. By the time they do, Nugget®’s manufacturing capacity will have caught up to demand — selling a higher-quality product, at a similar or lower price, from a more trusted brand. What then will happen to the thousands of replicas that have been produced in China and shipped to North America? What about those still on the ocean? Where will they go? Who will buy them?
It’s these questions we should be spending more time on, if we weren’t too damn busy all the time. But sadly, I just don’t have the capacity. I’ll keep worrying about Nuggets, and I’ll leave the Fuggets to somebody else.