I was going through a couple of old folders today and I came across an old campaigns that still brings a smile to my face. It’s no secret that knockoffs have really hurt the industry and our company over the past decade since we started. Over the years we’ve done various things to raise awareness to this issue. As the situation with knockoffs got worse year after year and companies in Japan started down the path of bankruptcy my tone got more serious, but for this post I’d rather bring you back to a time when we could laugh about it at the same time we were fighting against it.

I’d like to present one of a few funny situations that we found ourselves in. If you guys like this perhaps I’ll share others later.

Here was the situation…

A company saw the popularity of the Varis intake ducts produced in carbon fiber for the 350Z. Despite the fact that we were operating Varis USA at the time, keeping a lot of stock and selling these at a really fair price ($140), some greedy guys came out with a knockoff. I think they were selling it for $95 instead of $140 or whatever…When they made their promotions online they clearly couldn’t write English well and they called them “ducks” instead of “ducts”. The fact that they kept promoting them as Varis replica carbon air ducks had me and the guys at our office constantly amused. At the time, a guy named Roo was working with me at Bulletproof and we came up with this image to combat the guys knocking off the parts. The photoshop credit and concept goes entirely to Roo and we happily hosted this image on our Varis website at the time just to play with the knockoff guys.

I got a good laugh out of this today when I saw it for the first time in 5 years.