Counterfeit Products on Jabong. Review on Jabong

So for a while now, I had my eye on a few blouses from the unheard but swanky sounding brand, Liebemode on Jabong. But alas, at INR 2500 each, they were more than the pocket of a 20-something salaried gal could afford. Didn’t hurt to look at them every day though, did it? So finally when the 60% discount hit the brand, guess what I did? Yup, I jumped to grab the pieces before the right sizes were all wiped out.

Now all the retail therapy loving girls out there know what it’s like when you are waiting for your dream pieces to come home. Tracking the packages, coz hey, you can’t wait to flaunt your new garments that same evening. Checking and rechecking the images to make sure the pieces are just as stunning as you remember them to be. See that tiny little zipper at the back? Ensures a great fit. That delicate, almost dreamy black fabric; I could almost feel it against my skin. My wardrobe was about to get swankier. And so I was happy.

Then, the package arrived.

To say that these are not nearly as good as the images on Jabong is a gross understatement. A local tailor could probably do a better job at imitating the blouses. Honestly, it seems like a half-hearted attempt; zipper missing, poor quality material, amateurish stitching and unbelievably ridiculous fit.

And so I made a return request which was acknowledged immediately. I would get credits in my Jabong account, I would purchase something pretty using these and that could have been the end of the matter. Except that I was supremely pissed.

Whose fault was it? Was Jabong selling me counterfeit products? Or was this the quality of the garments that the posh sounding Liebemode actually produced? After looking around a little bit, I found out that Jabong was responsible for the packaging, shipping and ‘quality check’ for this brand. Hmm, the mystery gets deeper.

So after digging around a little bit more, here is what I found out.

The first design, and the images are the property of a UK brand, called Vesper. The second design is owned by the British online fashion store ASOS. All other Liebemode blouses and their designs, as you can guess, belong to other international fashion powerhouses. So all that Liebemode is really doing is stealing images from top international brands, passing them off as their own and then selling off implausibly poor quality imitations to the hapless victims of this online fashion era. Now you find all sort of counterfeit products online these days. From ‘Priyanka Chopra stunning peach lehenga’ to the 500 bucks Bose earphones, we have seen it all. But what is truly disturbing about this incident is that our very own online fashion giant Jabong is lending credibility to this brand.

So dear Jabong, here are a few questions I would like to ask you.

· Are you truly unaware of the counterfeiting practices of Liebemode?

· If you were unaware; is it not your responsibility to keep a check on the brands that you sell?

· If you were in fact aware; do you have to resort to cheap gimmicks such as these to keep your brand afloat?

· How many other counterfeit products do you think you store and sell?

· And most importantly, what kind of ‘quality check’ did you perform on these blouses from Liebemode?

As great as you are at customer-service, I am sure I will receive a response very soon. So until then.

-Your ex customer.