Ortlieb made in China knockoff / copy / scam ?
 

saw this advertised on my local used stuff website
95 litres!!!

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-view-details...m_medium=email


and then this page from the link to the supposed manufacturer
this one appears to be a complete Ortlieb clone, and in the photo of the panniers, when you choose the red ones, there is a suspicious pixel blur right where the "Ortlieb" name would be. I worked with Photoshop going way back, 1994, and this blur certainly looks like an incredibly sloppy patch job to cover up the Ortlieb name.

North Vybe : Bike Bag (model #1)

this makes me think of those Big Agnes Chinese tent clones, I dont recall the name but they simply went all stereotype and cloned a known design.
Heck, Soviet Russia cloned early Leica cameras post war, I remember seeing one once and these products remind me of that total disregard for copyright etc that authoritarian societies have done in the past.

re the Ortlieb thing, this could also simply be a scam...who knows.

buyer beware

"Completely Water Resistant"

:lol:

thing you gotta remember is here in our china, IPR does not exist. it's a whole new dimension of copy-n-paste!

the folks here on the mainland do not value creativity, independence, innovation. a lot of it comes from the rote-memory style of education, due in large part to the language. english has 26 letters, thai has 44 consonants....chinese? nobody knows! counting obsolete and rarely used they have somewhere around 90,000 characters!!!! you need 3000 to graduate high school and function in society, 5000 to graduate university. the first 5 years of school, the time when young minds are molded, is spent memorizing hundreds and hundreds of characters. the rest of their education is spent memorizing large quantities of irrelevant garbage that must be regurgitated on command. no understanding required, just be able to reproduce on command.

western manufacturers have moved production here to cut expenses, looking for cheap labor, cheap materials, no safety requirements, no pensions, no unions, no environmental regulations, no social security.......and no ipr protection.

chinese don't protect their own citizens, so can't expect them to protect foreign companies. most often they'll copy a product design and the logo, but change one or two letters. you'll find ckavin clein jeans and panasomic batteries, and a thousand varieties of KFG MFG FKG etc chicken places.

factories in shenzhen are given the specs and told to produce x million units. at the end of the production run, they'll often keep the machines going, produce an extra hundred thousand and lightly modify the logo.

buyer beware? absolutely. the chinese can produce quality merchandise...if they want to. but they've found the cheapest quality carp sells the best. they learned that from the western manufacturers that came here specifically to cut costs, many times specifically asking for the lowest quality to sell at the lowest cost.

it's a carp shoot. you might luck out and get an exact copy from the authorized factory, other times........

The waterproof seam welding is not proprietary to Ortlieb...

I'm not too surprised WRT fake "95 L" back rollers.

Thomson stems have been counterfeited by China makers for several years, there's probably some on eBay this very minute. Be careful who you buy from.

https://ridemonkey.bikemag.com/threa...-stems.248870/

oh absolutely, I did product photography at times, and this is exactly the same shot.

and again, one really carppy photoshop job, heck even in 1993 I would have done a better job than that.

I always remember 1994 taking a Photoshop course, because in the elevator heading home, I learned that Aryton Senna had been killed that day, and in those years, I had taken a bit of a hiatus from following F1 closely, so hadnt seen the race or heard the news.

nothing fishy about any of your statements, seems to me to hit the nail on the head.

I am tempted to buy their "road bike #3 "

and especially because it has 25, yes 25 speeds.

12 and a half cog cassettes are the new orange.

LOL! Don't give SRAM any ideas about the next big thing since the 1x drivetrain.

Don't worry. I'm sure they already have people working on the marketing for a new idea of THREE Chainrings coming out in a couple years now that all bikes are coming with one ring. You'll be able to climb hills so easily! I'm almost overwhelmed by the cutting edge new tech and ideas they keep coming up with these days. Between that and the next "new" wheel size, the industry will set record profits. ...again. :rolleyes:

I would add that if those large panniers really do have a volume of 95l, it would be very easy to have one very very instable bike with all that on the rear.
Now I guess its not that different than my 40l panniers and a rackpack on top, which I think is maybe 35l, I can't recall, but panniers this spacious could very easily get overfilled.

remember Ortlieb makes those oversized rear panniers, 60l I think, which could be very handy for cold weather trips where its volume and not necessarily weight that would add bulk with clothes, sleeping bag etc.

in any case, from the photos, these 95l could be fine, or they could be really carpy, as is the apparent Ortlieb clones also, which their website says is also 95l, which just doesnt make sense.

a whole lot of "buyer beware" going on here.

I was just frankly surprised to see this on a Montreal kijiji site, a craigslist sort of thing, for a company supposedly stationed in San Fran I believe it says.

I guess it makes sense, hit all the known used sites, get traffic, and set your prices of the panniers on the website at 3 times the selling price on the craigslist thing, and snag folks.

Seen Canadien cycle tour riders happily using the waterproof panniers MEC sells ..

Check out this backpack listing:

North Vybe

Looks like the same type of smudging out of the logo.

yup

I have seen items being sold on ebay at prices that must only be put up hoping some poor sucker will hit the "buy it now" button or whatever, when a simple web search would show that the price is waaay more than the product is being sold for in all kinds of regular stores.

buyer beware, plain and simple.

See if they answer their phone in San Francisco. If they are really there ..

You already asked at BBB ?

nope.
Like I said, just fascinating to see them advertising on a montreal craigs list type site.

I bought a Chinese knock-off of a Tubus Tara rack 5 yrs ago for ~ $15. It withstood the roads of Ukraine and Central Asian without complaint. Any rack that can do that put up with that crap is a good rack, regardless of where it was made.

hey, its all fun and games until you have melamine in the babys milk.

Hah, here in Australia you can get genuine Ortlieb for A$199, about $140 a pair, and sign up with your email and get 10% off!https://www.velogear.com.au/bicycle-...7-colours.html

I expect if you order a big enough batch, the German manufacturer, for a price, can ship a few hundred sets ,

with a yours, different, or no logo...

I am fairly certain that this whole thing is a fast ploy to accompany the "craigslist" type ad I referred to first--the one that I saw listed in my local used stuff web company called "kijiji"

the bags they are selling, new, for $115, are presented and the wording used to snag someone looking for bike panniers, they see the ad for new waterproof bags of 95l (wow, thats large they think)
these bags look similar to Ortlieb bags, although are not a copy, but then the link to the company page shows the various models, all in the price range of 300 dollars, so the "get it now, Im willing to let them go for $115" ad copy snags folks who dont know panniers that much.

the webpage shows the uniformed buyer that this company makes other panniers, bikes, backpacks for hiking, so it all looks legit.

Im fairly certain this is the thing going on here.

again, I put this up more as a "BUYER BEWARE" cautionary tale, although the ads are targeted at regular folks who probably dont have the pannier knowledge we do, so the crowd here would not be fooled.

I still figured it warranted some exposure though

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-view-details...dId=1502042593

This looks like a scam. Already contacted the seller, who's selling a bunch of these "new and in the box". She's willing to send them through the mail for 120$ shipping included. How bad can these panniers be? I mean, even if they're fake crap, would they still do the job or should I stay away? What I don't want is something that's going to break in the middle of nowhere, 1000 km from home.

Woah
indy, it would appear the link you put up last year just got porn bombed.
see previous page of topic. Never seen that before here

you know, a neighbor of mine may have bought a pair of these, I'll look at them next time, saw them briefly the other week