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If you follow me on social media you may have seen that I have been fighting a losing battle against knock-offs for the better part of a year now. The counterfeit bags are available everywhere from Amazon to Temu and keep getting promoted on tiktok and instagram by influencers with millions of followers. My sales have suffered so badly as a result that I had to sell my house. I had a small uptick in orders in early November when Trixie Mattel promoted a knock-off of my bag on her youtube channel and people found me through comments crediting me for the original design. That helped me to reach my sales threshold for the month, but it was just a fluke (and honestly a very depressing fluke even though it resulted in some sales lol! Trixie's team took down that part of the video but never replied to any of my messages offering to send her one of my bags.) Every single day I wake up to messages from people alerting me to a Temu ad or a tiktok shop selling copies of my bags, and the fight feels very futile at this point.

I've made the hard decision to stop selling my purses. I just can't compete with the knock-offs anymore. I've had a difficult time meeting the minimum order requirement with my manufacturer, and it's really hard to convince people to special order a bag from me that will take 5-6 months to be produced when they can just buy the knock-off on Amazon. 

I still plan to pursue legal action when I can afford a lawyer. I have a pending patent on the design (63/153,700) but I haven't been able to afford the legal bills it would require to finish it and enforce it. So even if I can't do it for years, I am very intent on making sure that my design is fully mine again someday. This idea was borne from a health crisis in which I found myself needing to carry water with me at all times, and it is so gutting to have had something so personal to me, such an integral part of my life story, be stolen. So it's not just about the money. It's about my dignity and fighting for what I believe is right.

I understand that halting production of my bags means that the only place to buy them will be from the people who stole my design. But I don’t really have a choice. If you do decide to buy a knock-off, please consider tipping me on Venmo (@kategabrielle) or purchasing something from my shop to balance things out.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my shop throughout this. I appreciate you so much!!