Quince copied its way to a $10 billion empire. Now it’s looking for a new story

There’s a $298 midi dress on Reformation’s website with delicate lace detailing throughout and a button front that allows you to show some leg—it’s the kind of dress the brand is known for, versatile and a little seductive. On Quince, there’s what appears to be the same dress: It has the same silhouette, the same fabric, the same drape. The Quince version costs $69.90.

That $228 difference is Quince’s entire business model. At a time of inflation, when consumers are looking to curb their spending, Quince’s approach has been wildly successful. Eight years after launch, Quince generates upwards of $1 billion in annual revenue, has a 1,000-strong staff, adds hundreds of new items to the site per week, and has expanded beyond clothing to furniture and home goods, menswear and kids, wellness products like collagen peptides, and even food. (Its $125 caviar has been a huge hit.) This week, Quince snagged $500 million in Series E funding, valuing the company at $10.1 billion.

Quince hasn’t achieved this scale without blowback. It has been sued by the parent companies of Coach and UGG for copying their designs, and Williams-Sonoma has taken aim at its comparative advertising practices. Most recently, Quince has been hit by a consumer class action lawsuit claiming its pricing is deceptive. All of this has shaped the public perception of Quince as a company that makes cheap knock-offs.

Now, Quince is betting that it isn’t enough to be known as a dupe factory. It needs something more: a brand.

In a sign of this evolution, Quince hired Dakota Kate Isaacs—who previously built the cult skincare brand The Ordinary—to be its first head of brand strategy and narrative.

“My role is not to create a new story,” she tells Fast Company. “It’s to humanize Quince and let consumers get a glimpse behind the curtain.”

The Copycat’s Playbook

In 2018, Sid Gupta, his wife Zunu Mittal, and two others launched Quince in Palo Alto, California. These founders believed they had identified enormous inefficiencies in the retail industry that consumers end up paying for. Whereas Direct-to-consumer brands educated consumers about how bypassing department stores allowed them to cut out retail markups. Quince was built to go deeper into the system and be, in its parlance, a “manufacturer-to-consumer” brand.

By working directly with factories—cutting unsold inventory that inflate prices and eliminating brokers, suppliers, and other middlemen—they could sell products at a fraction of the price of competitors, including $50 cashmere sweaters, $80 silk blouses, and $100 linen sheets.

Quince isn’t shy about the fact that it is actively monitoring what consumers are searching for on the internet and figuring out how to make cheaper versions of other brands’ best-selling products. In a radical move that has ruffled the industry, Quince points out on each product page how much other brands charge for items that look indistinguishable; they are often two, three, or five times more expensive.

Can Quince Become a Real Brand?

Quince brought on Isaacs to create an identity for the company that goes beyond being a copycat. Isaacs built her career at The Ordinary, a cult skincare label that disrupted the beauty industry with transparent pricing and ingredient-forward marketing.

Starting as a P.R. intern, Isaacs quickly proved her mettle and spent five years building the company’s entire U.S. operation from scratch—hiring staff, developing social media strategies, getting into retail. One of her biggest accomplishments was landing the brand in Sephora. Sephora’s merchants initially resisted The Ordinary because they thought it would encourage their customer to trade down from more expensive labels—but it eventually became one of Sephora’s top-selling brands.

The parallel to Quince is not lost on Isaacs. Just as The Ordinary challenged the assumption that skincare had to be expensive to be effective, Quince is challenging the assumption that quality clothing and home goods require premium prices. “The consumer has kind of been conditioned to believe that quality must be expensive to be real,” Isaacs says. “I’ve seen behind the scenes, I know how this works.”

When Quince approached Isaacs for this new role, she was intrigued by the opportunity to help bridge the gap between consumer perception and what she thought was a very radical business model underneath. She empathizes with some consumers’ wariness about Quince because she had similar reservations when she first encountered the brand four years ago. “My perception prior to joining the business was like, ‘Something’s sketchy here, like something’s off,'” she recalls.

But as she’s gone behind the scenes at Quince, she believes there’s a compelling story to tell about how the company is radically reimagining the supply chain and democratizing quality. “People should think about Quince less as a brand and more as a new operating model for retail,” she says.

Her job, as she sees it, is not to spin a new narrative but to do a better job explaining what the company already does. Isaacs is inspired by Everlane’s approach to storytelling when it first launched in 2011, as it tried to explain how the cost of a t-shirt balloons thanks to expensive brand campaigns and department store markups.

Over the years, Everlane has moved away from this messaging, which gives Quince an opportunity to pick up where it left off. Isaacs wants every consumer touchpoint—from the first ad impression to the moment a package arrives—to convey a consistent message about quality, transparency, and the logic of the system.

The Dupe Problem

But changing consumer perception is no easy task. And Quince is known as being a dupe-maker extraordinaire.

Quince’s rise is inseparable from the broader cultural moment that made dupe culture mainstream. For years, buying knockoffs carried a social stigma—something you did but didn’t necessarily advertise. That has changed in the era of social media and inflation, when many creators proudly share cheaper dupes of their favorite products.

Susan Scafidi, a professor of fashion law at Fordham Law School, has observed this change closely. “Everyone has access to imitation goods, and social media celebration of dupes has become a communal way to concurrently show off fashion knowledge and financial savvy,” she says. “Dupe, a diminutive nickname for ‘duplicates,’ does some of the work of making the otherwise morally questionable world of fakes, copies, knockoffs, replicas, and worst of all counterfeits, sound adorable.”

When asked about the dupe characterization, Isaacs pushes back. “Many silhouettes are not unique to a single brand,” she says. “These are things that have existed for years across categories—a silk slip dress, a cashmere sweater, linen bedding. These are not proprietary designs. They’re ubiquitous products that a lot of brands produce.”

While Quince does makes general items that aren’t visually associated with a single brand, it has also copied designs with distinct features, like the Reformation dress, Coach’s Rogue bag, and UGG boots. Scafidi notes that while Quince has managed to avoid the most common fast-fashion IP violations—infringing trademarked logos or copyrighted fabric prints—it has found itself in more complex territory. Trade dress claims, like those brought by Deckers about Quince’s version of UGG boots, argue that a shoe’s silhouette alone can be protected IP if consumers strongly associate that shape with a particular brand.

Quince pushed back against Deckers with an antitrust countersuit that argued that the company is running a “litigation mill” to maintain a monopoly over sheepskin boots. “That action may be largely part of Quince’s efforts to control the narrative and cast itself as a good guy,” Scafidi says, “a quality-oriented, transparent, slow-fashion brand trying to deliver value to consumers.” (Deckers lost its key trade dress claim, but it has come back with a new wave of lawsuits.)

The Williams-Sonoma lawsuit alleges that by directly comparing its products to Pottery Barn and West Elm, Quince is unfairly benefitting from these brands’ hard-earned reputation for quality. Quince is fighting back, calling the suit a case of an established brand using litigation to squash a scrappier competitor. There has yet to be a ruling.

“Brands can’t stop Quince from engaging in legitimate comparisons,” Scafidi says. But she points out that if Quince is, in fact, making lower quality products than those of Pottery Barn and West Elm, “creating a halo effect around lesser goods could be deceptive.”There hasn’t yet been a ruling.

The Work Ahead

Legal issues aside, Neil Saunders, managing director and analyst at GlobalData Retail, argues that building a brand entirely on dupes is a losing business strategy in the long run. “If your competitive position in the market, especially in fashion, is that you go around copying everyone else, you’ll definitely find an audience for it, but it’s not very imaginative,” he says. “If you’re a copycat, you’re always later to market. Premium brands do well because they have a distinct point of view and people will buy into that aesthetic.”

That’s a ceiling that even a $10 billion dupe company will eventually hit, Saunders says.

Without a strong brand, consumers have no reason to stick with Quince if a cheaper dupe-maker shows up. “I don’t know how defensible this business model is,” says Vidyuth Srinivasan, founder of Entrupy, a tech company focused on fighting counterfeits. “They’ve done an awesome job scaling this business model, but it is definitely possible to replicate it.”

Now, it falls on Isaacs to reshape Quince’s identity from being maker of lower-priced goods to having a compelling story in its own right. Her goal is to focus on Quince’s efforts to shake up the status quo and democratize quality. The companies that have done this best—Everlane’s ‘radical transparency’ era, The Ordinary’s ingredient-obsessed honesty, Warby Parker’s mission-driven pricing—succeeded by making their mission feel urgent and understandable, then keeping it front and center.

The $500 million raised in this round will go toward building a world-class team, expanding into new international markets—Canada is live, Europe is next—and deepening the company’s range of categories. The investment, Isaacs says, reflects confidence in something more durable than a dupe strategy. “This latest round has really shown the trust in the system that exists,” Isaacs says.

For now, the Reformation dress—and the Quince dress that looks almost exactly like it—are still both for sale. The question is whether Quince can get consumers to want it not just because it’s cheaper, but because it’s Quince.