‘Brutal’: thousands of T-shirt designs stolen and listed on Temu, Sydney label claims
TL;DR
Warwick Levy, who has run the Sydney T-shirt label Lonely Kids Club for 15 years, says it was “brutal” to discover identical copies of his designs for sale on Temu. Between 2025 and earlier this year he found thousands of rip-offs on the Chinese marketplace. Levy suspects AI was used to scrape his entire website and replicate the designs at scale.
Nauti's Take
For small labels this is a warning sign, because AI makes copying entire collections cheap and fast. The same technology offers an opportunity too: image recognition can automatically track down knockoffs on marketplaces, something that used to require a big brand with a legal team.
Creators should document their designs and use monitoring tools, since the real problem is enforcement against platforms like Temu.
Sources