This Couch Is The Zip-Off Trouser Of The Furniture World – And It’s Duping The Dupes

Omhu's Teddy couch has gone viral on social media with its chilled-out modular design. Being copied online is an unfortunate byproduct of making a desirable product. And while you could take legal action, sure. You could lean in and have some fun. 

Monogram handbags, super-rare sneakers and … Omhu Teddy sofas. They’ve all fallen victim to dupes (when a seller mimics the style of an item and sells the copy for a lower price) with hoards of replica products found all over the internet. To be duped, something has to be popular. And Teddy sofas are exactly that. Scroll through social media, and you’ll likely see them flooding the floors of exposed brick apartments from TikTok-savvy design heads and generally stylish people. 

For a lot of city dwellers, being the owner of a conversation pit is a little ambitious. The Omhu Teddy’s modular design helps scratch that itch, with its ability to convert to more sociable, floor-based formats, as well as a sofa bed. Think of it as zip-off hiking shorts, but for your own space – less geography teacher on a field trip and oozing with sleek modular, minimalist Scandinavian design. It’s inspired by Ligne Roset’s Togo, which turned sofa design on its head with its 1973 frameless, foam make-up that makes users sit in a relaxed close to the ground. Throw all of that together, and you’ve got yourself a fair bit of buzz. 

With said buzz, comes a desire to be a part of the club, to own a piece of that design, which can lead to people finding dupes. But Omhu swerved the legal headaches of these products, and instead decided to have a bit of fun with it. 

Omhu sold its own dupe. Last week it dropped a real-fake ‘TEDY’ sofa in a ‘Dupe Orange’ colourway. Rather than launching through its usual channels like its webstore and showrooms, the dupe edition launched on Temu, Etsy, and dupe.com for a special edition price. But Omhu didn’t stop there, it launched an accompanying campaign, recruiting an army of “dupefluencers” (people who’ve built a career from looking like celebrities who have become influencers in their own right). It rolled out a billboard campaign, and dupe product videos accompanied by lines like “Made by adults. Who actually gets paid. In factories with addresses”, highlighting where costs are cut with duped items where as well as taking from the original’s design language, they also use different methods of production. 

To add to the madness, Temu took Omhu's listing down, as the branding of the dupe was too similar to that of the dupes. How’s that for irony?