UPDATE: This situation has been happily resolved! Hurray!
Though not exactly the same, the resemblance certainly is striking. You can judge for yourself. If anybody is to blame, though, it is the designer, in this case Goody Two Sleeves, who sold the imitation tee design under the pretenses of being original. And because both Hot Topic and Goody Two Sleeves are both so much larger than SEIBEI, they are likely to get away with selling this unoriginal t-shirt.
But what is even more damaging to SEIBEI is that it’s likely that people will be exposed to the Goody Two Shoes version first and then think that the SEIBEI original by David Murray is a copy-cat. This has negative effects on both his image and on his sales for those who are unaware that David’s design was in fact original.
Shady business practices of this sort (and even more direct copies) happen all the time in the clothing industry, where a larger retailer of design firm directly steals the designs of or copies the ideas of smaller, independent designers. Urban Outfitters might be the most notorious in the indie t-shirt circle, but Hot Topic is pretty fond of it as well, as is Billabong.
But indie designers and bloggers have to fight back! So shout it from the mountain, organize protests in front of your local Hot Topic (but be careful to avoid any of their customers’ safely rebellious spikes), or just buy a t-shirt from SEIBEI. But telling all your friends that David/SEIBEI did it first couldn’t hurt.
If you want to support SEIBEI and David, you could wear the original Sandwich Dinosaur with pride. I know I do.
You can read David’s take on the situation here. And if you do buy something from SEIBEI, you can use coupon code fanblog for 10% off.
UPDATE: Sarah posted this information about contacting Hot Topic in a comment on David’s original blog entry:
For anyone who wants to contact Hot Topic:
http://community.hottopic.com/customerservice/talktous.asp
or 1-626-839-4681 (customer service)
You will want to reference the product number: SKU# 243424 (design by Goodie Two Sleeves)
UPDATE 2: Digg the original post to help spread the word.
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great post - it’s good to see somebody highlighting a problem like this. it’s sad that this type of thing spans across all creative industries; non-designers in it for the money and theiving ideas. it’s not all bad though, one could argue that the people who really have their ear to the ground and are passionate about what they wear will *know* when things have been stolen as they follow the originals closely enough.