When innovation grows from imitation

You probably know him as that stern, cult-leader-ish face staring from billboards on multiple continents, clad in wire-rimmed glasses and a starched button-up shirt, like some Steve Jobs of the sleep industry.
Contrary to the haunt-your-dreams imagery, De Rucci guy isn’t the obsessively controlling scion of a long line of Milanese upholsterers. Instead, according
to the state-run China Daily newspaper, he’s a man called Timothy James Kingman who in 2009 allowed
Shenzhen-based De Rucci Healthy Sleep Co to permanently use his image in its advertisements.
“Perhaps De Rucci uses a White man’s face to pass
itself off as a European
company selling European
products?” the paper’s Zhang Zhouxiang wrote last week, lamenting the way local businesses use Western branding as a synonym for quality. “Such blind
worship is uncalled for in China, now that it has become the world’s second-largest economy.”
Zhang’s not wrong. From the company’s name, to Kingman’s face, to the French and Danish designers it emphasizes elsewhere on its website (next to stock imagery of someone, for some reason, stitching a leather shoe), De Rucci’s European stylings have always been an elaborate fake. The purpose is transparent: To counteract consumers’ prejudices about spending thousands of dollars on a product from China, a country still associated in many minds with low cost, low quality, and poor safety standards.
That shift from cultural shame and envy to cultural pride seems an almost inevitable part of innovation and industrial development wherever it’s happened in the world. In the 1940s, the corporate predecessor of Toshiba Corp imitated the desk fan designs of its shareholder and patent licensor General Electric Co, right down to the cursive Roman lettering on their bosses.
In the 1960s, the first Japanese cars imported into the US and Europe were mocked for their perceived low power and quality in explicitly racist terms.
Less than two decades later, Toyota Motor Corp, Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co had become so successful in taking on Detroit with cheaper, more
reliable vehicles that Washington waged a trade war to protect its dwindling domestic market share. Toyota, for its part, seems to have learned little from that history: The head of its premium Lexus brand declined in 2015 to set up a plant in China, now the world’s biggest luxury car market, on the grounds that quality would be compromised by manufacturing there.
Even the storied couturier whose associations with timeless style and perfection seem to have inspired De Rucci’s brand name had humble beginnings. In the 1890s, a teenaged Guccio Gucci worked as a lowly porter at London’s Savoy hotel, carrying leather luggage made by Asprey, HJ Cave, and Louis Vuitton before returning to Florence
to found his own saddlery and baggage-maker. “Italian fashion” as we know it didn’t really exist until the 1950s, when aristocratic entrepreneur Giovanni Giorgini spotted a gap in the market driven by French couturiers’ failure to cater to the tastes of American department store customers. As with De Rucci’s conquest of the world, it’s remarkable how far a business can go if it offers good value, smart branding and a keen eye on what the market wants.
The path all those companies have followed is the same. Most technological progress comes not from lightbulb moments, but from a slow but fruitful process
of learning-by-doing —
the 99% of perspiration matched with 1% inspiration in Thomas Edison’s famous formula for creative genius. If De Rucci’s products are any good, it’s not
because of an invented European history, but the fact that they’re making and selling $700 million worth of mattresses a year — and, inevitably, spotting small and large ways to advance the process as they do.

—Bloomberg