This spring, furniture-price-comparison engine Dupe.com launched and quickly went viral, thanks to a combination of savvy marketing and consumer demand for cheap stuff. The site quickly made waves—and enemies. Only months after the launch, home retail giant Williams-Sonoma sued Dupe.com, alleging false advertising, unfair competition and copyright infringement. Now Dupe.com has responded to the lawsuit, asking the judge overseeing the case to throw it out of court.

“Likely feeling threatened by the consumer transparency Dupe.com provides, WSI filed this [lawsuit] in an apparent attempt to coerce Dupe.com into shutting down its service,” reads the motion, filed in court last week. “[Their] claims should be dismissed entirely.”
Though Dupe.com drew heat—in the design industry at least—for steering consumers to knockoffs, Williams-Sonoma’s case is not about look-alike furniture. Instead, the retailer homed in on a series of promotional videos that the platform posted to Instagram and TikTok in its early days. In them, one of the startup’s founders, Bobby Ghoshal, tells the viewer he fell for “pricing scams,” accusing the furniture industry of white-labeling generic product.

At least a handful of these videos specifically reference Williams-Sonoma brands, including one about Pottery Barn that calls the company “pretty guilty” of “buying their products from the same few factories, [calling] them different names [and pricing] them differently … almost all the time.”

In a suit filed in late August, the retail giant accused Dupe.com of a laundry list of bad behavior, including copyright violation (for using its photography in the videos), false advertising (Williams-Sonoma argues that it designs the vast majority of its product in-house, counter to Dupe.com’s claims), and trademark violation.

Dupe.com’s response is a defiant rebuttal across the board. The motion is a knotty thicket of legal language (it cites 62 outside cases to make its points, including one involving the infamous NXIVM cult) that wanders deeply into the weeds of various subjects—including whether the company stores product images on its own servers and an exploration of what precisely the term white-labeling means.

In essence, the site argues that its claims about practices in the furniture industry are broadly true; Williams-Sonoma failed to show it was harmed by Dupe.com’s videos; grabbing copyrighted photos is fair use; and comments like “pretty guilty” or “almost all the time” are what’s known as “nonactionable puffery”—a term for marketing language that’s too vague to be considered factually inaccurate or misleading.

In its lawsuit, Williams-Sonoma argued that Dupe.com directed consumers toward fast furniture that’s typically manufactured unsustainably and ends up clogging landfills. In the rebuttal, Dupe.com’s lawyers brought up their own ethical dimension: that the retailer was acting merely to protect its pricing power. “[Williams-Sonoma] brings this lawsuit in a blatant attempt to suppress the valuable transparency Dupe.com brings to the market,” reads the motion.

Dupe.com’s lawyers asked the court to dismiss the suit and reward attorney’s fees. Williams-Sonoma—which has itself been the recent target of false advertising lawsuits by the FTC, Crypton and a consumer class-action group—did not respond to a request for comment.