Smow: Your guarantor for genuine licensed originals

Night clock (George Nelson by Vitra)

The discussion around originals and plagiarisms in designer furniture it is not only a dialectic excercise but a real problem for many produces and retailers of licensed furniture. In the previously mentioned article “The Original” by Rolf Fehlbaum we provided a gentle introduction to the theme: That the problem is very real can be seen in the regularity with which cases are heard before various courts. In 2006, for example, an Italian furniture company was banned from calling the products it sold in Germany “Bauhaus Design”. The reasoning from the judges was simple: Dimensione did not possess in a license to use the name Bauhaus and as such the imitation articles combined with the description as a Bauhaus Design Object was misleading.

Smow only deals with officially licensed furniture and accessories. All our producers posses the rights for the respective pieces and none of the articles offered for sale are plagiarisms. While the articles are not from the first production phase, nor always built by the designer they are all 100% original. And so when buying design furniture don’t just check the quality of the craftsmanship that went into creating the piece, but also the genuineness of the license under which the piece was created.