Buyer beware. (Kartell, Herman Miller, Fritz Hansen, Knoll, Carl Hansen & Søn / Graphic by Quartz)
Last year, US customs officers seized over $4 million worth of fake chairs. It was the first year that the agency had ever seized containers-full of such unauthorized reproductions, thanks in part to a novel new training that’s turning port inspectors into design connoisseurs.
Over the past 18 months, a five-year-old consortium of furniture manufacturers and design firms called BeOriginal has been training US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers to distinguish real Eames, Starck, and van der Rohe designs from fakes, among others. It’s working: According to CBP’s Intellectual Property Rights Seizure Statistics report (pdf, p.5), in 2016, customs officials confiscated 42 shipments of unauthorized replicas worth an estimated $4.2 million. In the same report, the CBP claimed that their “furniture enforcement efforts have helped to protect over 8,000 American jobs” a figure calculated according to workforce data provided to them by US furniture manufacturers.