When I moved to China in 2012 I was obsessed with Taobao. Contrary to the Western prejudgement that China was bereft of consumer variety, it was clear by that point that two forces conspired together to offer a superabundance of goods:
Virtually all consumer products were manufactured in China, and more importantly,
Every boardroom around the world had, or was beginning to have, a quarter single mindedly committed to 'owning the China market'
Taobao, as China's leading eCommerce marketplace, thereby became the concentration of all these initiatives.
Compounding all of this variety with a whole other question of provenance and authenticity was the fact that China was the leading global exporter of counterfeit goods. At the Nanjing-West fake market in Shanghai, vendors shilling fake watches would, when prompted, lead you into a small anteroom with more expensive and compelling counterfeits, and, prompted again, might then even open the door to the ante-ante-room.
In this context I became fascinated with headphones.
~2013 was about the time that Beats headphones took over the premium international market. Alongside this rise was a wave of counterfeit headphones.
Unlike a watch, the inner workings of headphones aren't readily grokkable. With the right access to plastic moulding, an enterprising counterfeiter can make a compelling surface, and thereby a compelling counterfeit. Visually identifying a driver is far beyond almost anyone's comprehension, and so, this is the perfect object to counterfeit.
I dove into Taobao, looking for some novel means of certifying the authenticity of a headphone.
One common strategy for identifying non-counterfeit products on an ecommerce marketplace is to dive into the 'long tail.'
Counterfeit operations require a decent outlay of capital - 10s of thousands of dollars for new moulds. The smaller the niche of a product, the riskier a counterfeiter's wager. In this context, I sought out some niche headphones.
Initially I set my heart on a pair of Sennheiser PX-200 on-ear foldable headphones. With a US street price of ~$100, they were available on Taobao for as little as $15.
Was this a case of overabundant supply driving a market-price down, or enterprising counterfeiters exploring the longtail?
Unconvinced, I looked for permutations of the product I could trust in this highly suspect environment.
Eventually I found it: according to the product description, Asiana Airlines, an international Korean carrier, had commissioned some hundreds of the PX-200s for its first class passengers. Some excess of the product had made their way onto Taobao for a massive discount, available for ~$30. The headband of the headset was inscribed 'Asiana Airlines.'
The pieces of this story formed a compelling picture. A niche headphone, with an even more niche product story, had effectively fallen off the back of the truck.
So naturally I bought them!
With headphones, the proof is in the experience, but even then there's a huge margin of placebo effect and diminishing returns. Statistically, folks can't distinguish between an uncompressed audio file and semi-passable MP3.
Even if these were counterfeit headphones, would I even be able to tell?
They arrived, they existed, and try as I might, I don't think I can convery how absolutely dog-shit-bad they sounded out of the box.
I'd been had, and I'd been had thoroughly. I'd been tricked it a way that only Philip K Dick or Jean Baudrillard could love. A longtail instance of a longtail product, still subject to the same paranoid forces of counterfeiting and simulation. Hats off to the counterfeiter.
Have you considered the fact that maybe Asiana Airlines are the people that fell victim to the counterfeiter? Or perhaps that the Sennheisers you were looking for just don't sound good to you? :)