Counterfeit Blades?

[DaltonGang]

I ordered a 100 Feathers, last year. Yellow packs of 5. It came from Hong Kong.

 

[DonMac]

That's certainly up to you. These things usually go pretty smoothly, though. Amazon will instantly credit you with a refund, and give you thirty days to ship back the return, on their dime. You can use the original shipping box, print out a pre-paid label, make a quick trip to the nearest UPS Store, and Bob's your uncle.

NB: I'm not a shill for Amazon, just a generally satisfied customer who doesn't like to see innocent customers get screwed.

Another tip is, you can go on line and schedule a pickup, and never have to leave your home.

 

[Tulkinghorn]

Interesting thread. Here is my input regarding feather blades

1.. The logo has changed, even the official website now displays the rectangular logo.

2.. If seen from my perspective, I wouldn't trust the yellow packaging. I would like to play safe here. The reason being, most of the deals on amazon USA are delivered by some other seller instead of "Feather Safety razor co." But on amazon.co.jp, they sell blade packs themselves in form of 5, 10 and 20 blade packs only and none of these packs mention "Platinum coating". All these packs have same color scheme i.e. Grey and black.

link for pack of five
link for pack of ten
link for pack of twenty


Here is the image of feather Hi-stainless that I believe is a fake one and yes it is taken from amazon


and here is the image for the blade which is exactly like mine and is genuine (received it from Japan directly).



The two main differences are

1.... The people who designed fake blades, actually did a great job. But their machinery wasn't advanced enough to copy the knot tying the nib of the two feathers together (this is the real feather's signature). Plus, the feather arrangement in fake one is different as compared to real one (copycat signature)

2.... The body of the letter "i" goes higher than the "-" character written right after it. Plus the font used are entirely different.


IMO, purchasing blades in grey and black color scheme pack with newer logo, is the safest route.

These are all my opinions and if I will ever purchase feather blades, I will keep above points in mind.

Very interesting and helpful post. Couple of interesting things about the yellow 5 pack blades I purchased from Amazon: The printing on the blades, as far as I can tell, matches the confirmed genuine blades. The same seller has listings for 5 packs in the grey and black packaging.

This is suggests one of two things to me: either the ones I got from Amazon are real (which is what I'm now thinking is the case) or else it's just really hard to spot all the fakes.

 

[imfallen_angel]

What I find interesting is the "why bother".. DE blades are so cheap to buy compared to cartridges, that between the work to make the fakes, the distribution, etc. plus the risk, they'd have to sell a lot of them to even balance the expenses.

If it would be a question of repackaging a cheaper brand that's worth half the price, but even then... Let's say they would get wholesale some blades that are worth about 5$ per 100, then selling them cheaper than the real thing to liquidate the stock, barely making 10$ per 100 packs, it just doesn't sound like a good investment.

Cartridges I'd understand...

 

[Tulkinghorn]

Actually you can find genuine blades in yellow packs too. But do know, counterfeits also come in same packs. This is the only reason I would prefer purchasing grey-black theme packs with Japanese written all over it.

Well, at this point I have an additional 100 Feathers on the way from a respected U.S. seller, so with any luck I won't even need to worry about it again for a couple of years.