In 2025, IICombined, the company behind the eyewear brand Gentle Monster, reported declines in both revenue and operating profit — the first year its growth had faltered since the brand launched. Over the same period, one of the names most frequently discussed in the fashion industry was Blue Elephant, an eyewear brand that grew rapidly amid accusations of borrowing Gentle Monster's design language, earning the nickname "the budget Gentle Monster." The way the two brands kept appearing side by side naturally produced a question: did the copycat cause the original's slump? This column starts from the view that the question has been drifting in a rather simplistic direction.
What Actually Happened Between the Two Brands
Blue Elephant has faced repeated criticism for releasing sunglasses that closely resemble specific seasonal products from Gentle Monster. Side-by-side comparison content spread quickly among consumers, and those comparisons themselves became one of the main channels through which Blue Elephant gained recognition. As word circulated online that products with nearly identical silhouettes were selling for around 300,000 won (roughly $220) on one side and 50,000 to 100,000 won (about $35 to $75) on the other, consumers were prompted to reconsider whether Gentle Monster's prices were justified.
This is where the dispute splits. Blue Elephant maintains that its designs were developed independently. Some industry insiders and Gentle Monster fans, on the other hand, see deliberate, repeated imitation. A significant number of consumers reported that the resemblance was hard to miss when the two brands' products were placed together, and the controversy ran for quite a while across fashion communities and trade media.
Whether this controversy directly explains Gentle Monster's earnings decline, however, is a separate question. The consumers who moved to Blue Elephant may never have been particularly willing to pay Gentle Monster's prices in the first place. Premium brands do not build their core customer base around the most price-sensitive shoppers. If losing that segment is enough to shake the numbers, it may be a sign that the brand's positioning boundaries were blurry from the start.
What a Brand Loses as It Stretches Wider
In the fashion industry, it is difficult to claim legal ownership of a particular design language. That holds for fragrance, apparel, and eyewear alike. In this environment, what premium brands have long protected is not the design itself but the cultural context and consistency that produced it. Without the consumer perception that "this brand said it first, and said it most clearly," a price premium is hard to sustain.
Look at Gentle Monster's trajectory, and a different shift was already underway before the copycat controversy: the brand's expansion beyond eyewear into lipstick, food, and retail-space ventures. Each move can be read as an extension of the brand's universe. But each also dilutes the consumer's first association — "Gentle Monster is an eyewear brand." The more directions a brand stretches in, the weaker the signal that "this brand does this one thing best." Consumers who pay hundreds of dollars for premium eyewear often base that decision on the perception that the brand sets the standard for its category. Sustaining that perception requires the brand's focus to stay continuously, visibly sharp.
Critics of the copycat read the causation in reverse: the loss of sharpness, they argue, is the result of the copycat. When products resembling the original keep surfacing in the same search results, the original's weight in consumer perception gradually changes. As side-by-side comparison content multiplies, the consumer's first question shifts from "which one is better" to "why should I pay more." From this angle, Gentle Monster's decline is the direct consequence of image erosion caused by the copycat.
Which interpretation is closer to the truth is hard to settle right now. Most likely, several forces were at work at once: the copycat, diluted focus from brand expansion, market saturation, shifting consumer sentiment. But the productive move in this debate is not picking a winner between the two readings. It is finding the questions a brand operator can take away from the case.
What Small Brand Owners Should Examine First
The Gentle Monster–Blue Elephant affair looks like a dispute between large brands, but its underlying structure repeats far more often, and far closer to home, for solo entrepreneurs and small brand founders.
Run an online store long enough and you will eventually face a competitor selling something similar at a lower price. A course curriculum you spent years refining may show up somewhere in a familiar shape. If your first question in that moment is "how do I stop them," there is something worth examining first.
Does your brand have something beyond price that holds customers? It rarely comes from the shape or design of any particular product. It comes from the context and time behind the product — something that only emerges from a person who has kept refining the same subject for years. What cannot be copied overnight usually comes from that kind of accumulation. It is not produced by a perfect plan or a big campaign. The time you have put in, without stopping, is what makes a customer feel "I should buy this from this person." I believe that accumulation is the real line of defense that lets a small brand survive a price war.
It is also worth checking whether the customers who defected to the budget rival were ever core customers to begin with. Losing core customers and losing peripheral ones mean very different things for a brand. If it is the latter, the moment can instead become an occasion to define your brand more sharply. Replacing price-sensitive customers who left with customers who resonate with your brand's context and consistency hurts short-term revenue — but over the long run, it is also a path to a sturdier brand.
And you should weigh, coolly, whether a public copycat fight actually serves your brand. The more the controversy spreads, the more exposure your competitor gets, whether they want it or not. For a small brand, a public response can raise visibility — but it can also backfire by cementing the comparison itself.
How Gentle Monster will respond to this controversy is still an open question. It could pursue legal action, or it could answer quietly with its next collection. Which choice serves the brand better depends on what it now needs to explain anew to its customers.
A copycat controversy is sometimes an external signal that the original brand has reached the moment to redefine itself. Read that signal only as a cue to prepare a lawsuit, and the real opportunity — the redefinition — may pass quietly by.
