It came to my attention this morning that another company in our industry created a knock off of our social media starter package for interior designers.  I must admit that I was appalled that 1. someone would have the audacity to use our title, our pricing, our process, and some of our wording and that 2. this person was someone who had misled me and had phone conversations with me under false pretenses.

In response, I did what any social media maven would do, I tweeted about it.  I posted the two links to show the comparison between what we advertised as our package on our website, starting in February 2009, and what this person is now advertising.  As many said, the similarities were uncanny.

Upon confronting this person via telephone, I was told that there was no way that he would ever copy anyone.  When asked what I would like him to do, I merely said that if he felt like he had done nothing wrong, then he should leave the page up as it stands and he had nothing to worry about.

Needless to say, the individual’s page came down, the pricing for the package was changed to FREE and the individual began a Twitter crusade to align his troops against us.  I did not participate in this nor will I.   This is not how we work.  We work collaboratively internally and externally.  We can sleep at night.  We are not okay with imitation and plagiarism.  The Gibson Design Management team works too hard to have someone copy and paste, change a few words, and then call the work his own.

Below is a screen shot of the page that was put up as this person’s own “original idea”.

To see the description of our Social Media Starter package, please click on the box on the right of our blog entitled, “Introducing our New Social Media and Networking Starter Package”.  You too will recognize the “uncanny similarities”.

Our company’s stance on this incident is that we are disappointed that someone would not use his own ingenuity to develop a better mouse trap.  We are also very disappointed that he is now trying to smear our good name when we have done nothing more than let him know that we will not stand for this type of unprofessionalism.

The interior design industry does not stand for knock offs.

Author: Alexandra Gibson

Alexandra is the CEO of Gibson Design Management and Managing Partner of interior design firm, Gibson Design Group. When she's not busy trying to build an empire, you can find Alexandra riding a horse, giving back to the community, playing with her Scottie, McCord, or drinking a martini (preferably not all four at once).

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.