Follow the leader

With new kids' stores popping up every where, especially within walking distance of our sweet one-of-kind funky style boutique, we have to address the issue of copy cats.

We used to feel that to copy, to mimic, to down right imitate or steal someone else's product, sense of style or flavor was just plain lazy and showed lack of imagination. Isn't there more than enough product to go around? Why so blatantly choose what I have chosen for my store? Answer —because you have been shopped, dummy, and they know your store does well; all the moms talk.

Humans are not the only conformists in the animal kingdom. New research shows that chimpanzees also tend to imitate their peers, suggesting the human penchant for following the leader may be more deeply rooted than thought.

Researchers have demonstrated cultural learning in chimps by introducing two female chimps and teaching them how to get food out of a complicated apparatus using a stick. One chimp learned to poke the barrier with a stick and the other to lift the barrier with the stick. Then two groups of chimps watched the chimp "experts" use their skills. When the groups were allowed to try their own hand at freeing the food, they followed the lead of their own expert chimp — the poker's group preferred to poke and the lifter's group tended to lift.

The point of the story is there always will be a leader and there always will be a follower. You have to ask yourself which one are you?

About five years ago, the children's specialty boutique started catching on like wildfire. Moms no longer felt they needed to settle on products that already were available. Celebrity parents wanted their children to reflect their personal style of what is hip, rocky or edgy. Stay-at-home moms pulled out their sewing machines and used their babies as models. Everyone just wanted a little piece of what has become a $9 billion pie.

What started out being great new tees, jeans or shoes for your little ones, purchased by one-of-kind, cute boutiques, with unique display ideas, have all been knocked-off, counterfeited and trafficked across the planet.

Does it make you angry? Yes, but can it be helped or is it like Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Build a better mouse trap and the masses will follow the path to your door." We all are trying to build the better mouse trap, except some of us mice are a lot more industrious than others. I like to call the other mice the "wait-and-see-how-they-do mice."

From what I can see, we all go to the same shows where all the many merchants get the opportunity to peddle their new and old Shmates (rags for my non-Jewish readers). Like the trained chimps, we follow each other up and down the tightly packed aisles of the huge convention centers hoping to actually be able to spot a fabulous find and hoping to be the only ones in our area to unveil this shiny new product in our store, at least for a minute. When we finally find it, we guard it closely; we don't discuss our purchase too loudly for fear of being overheard. We ask our vendors for exclusivity as if driving three miles to another zip code were really exclusive.

You wait anxiously for about three months and come to find out you and your top three or four competitors and the Internet retailers all get shipped at the same time and it turns out we were all psyched over the same (say it with me) Shmates.

So to all the leaders, we must continue our quest, educate ourselves on patents, copyrights, trademarks and actually something as simple as a cease and desist letter. Make arrangements with your vendors for, at the very least, zip code protection; you can put a lot of the copy cats at bay if even for a little while.