Fashion brand owner shares fix to get Temu dupes taken down

A Sydney-based fashion brand owner has shared a fix for getting thousands of duplicate listings removed from a popular online marketplace. Warwick Levy, owner of Lonely Kids Club, a genderless graphic tee company, discovered that copies of his T-shirts were being sold on Temu.

"It got to a point where our entire website was scraped, and we have thousands of designs … so all our designs were on Temu," Mr Levy said. "Our top-selling designs were on there like 10, 20, 30, 40 times from different sellers, all with lots of sales attributed."

The impact of duplicate listings

The copies hurt sales; the bestselling "get in the van" shirt — featuring a drawing of the Healthy Harold giraffe — suddenly became significantly less popular. Mr Levy said, "At the time we thought maybe it's just gone stale. But then once it got removed [from Temu], it picked back up almost immediately."

Like many other small designers in Australia who have found their work copied by overseas giants, Mr Levy did not have the time or money to take the fight to court, and was unsure what government bodies would be able to support him. "I'm a very small self-funded business without any sort of capital or investors, that sort of thing just didn't feel feasible," he said.

Filing a complaint

Mr Levy reached out to Temu and was directed to its Intellectual Property (IP) Violation form — but the problems did not stop there. "I spent like half an hour, 40 minutes going through and putting in data and then right before the end, where you then click to submit, it just disappeared; the whole window vanished, and then I lost all my work," he said. "I tried it again, spent another 40 minutes and then again, it disappeared."

"I really stressed out because I was like, 'I've lost, like, my work twice; I feel very helpless in this situation, and I don't know what's going on.'"

A workaround

After struggling to successfully navigate Temu's IP violation portal on different browsers, he found a workaround to complete the form. Mr Levy said he started by having the information needed for the report prepared in a separate document. Then he opened the IP form in an incognito window, signed in and never closed the tab.

By acting fast, he was able to get the form through to the final stage. After that, he says it took days before he received a confirmation. Some of the listings Warwick Levy submitted to Temu for violating content were eventually removed — taking just over a week.

A Temu spokesperson said they had promptly removed the listings in question after the Lonely Kids Club's reports were received. "Sellers are required to comply with applicable laws and platform policies, and those found to violate our IP policies are subject to enforcement actions, including listing removal, account suspensions, or permanent bans," the spokesperson said.

Support from fans and future plans

Mr Levy said while he still found copies of his work online, it was not at the same scale as Temu. Throughout the process, the small business owner received great support from his fans, releasing a "How shit is Temu" tee that became very popular. "People did come out saying, 'I would never buy it from Temu again. Thanks for telling us and we'll make sure that we report it wherever we can as well,'" Mr Levy said. "It was really sweet."

He said he would like to see a hub created to support Australian designers impacted by IP violation. "I think Temu's more just created a culture with their marketplace that the sellers know they can scrape and steal and no one's going to stop them until it gets noticed," Mr Levy said.