The Truth About That Cursed Temu Croissant Lamp

It’s been a minute since I’ve been in your inbox! Over the last few months, I became a Reporter in Residence at Omidyar Network, traveled to Beijing and Wuhan, covered the influx of Chinese vapes for WIRED, and wrote about Amazon’s new direct-from-China strategy for The Atlantic. Alex Kantrowitz over at Big Technology and Andrea Varsany at The Globe and Mail were also both kind enough to have me on their podcasts to chat about Temu and Shein.

While these projects temporarily took me away from You May Also Like, I was delighted and humbled to watch as many of you continued signing up for this newsletter. Thanks for your patience, and I’m very excited to be back. As always, if you have feedback or ideas for me, you can reply directly to this email.

A Very Cursed Lamp

A TikTok user named @froginahatgirl posted a video earlier this month of a realistic croissant-shaped novelty lamp that she said her sisters bought for her on Temu. She explained that she recently noticed “hundreds of ants” were congregating underneath the lamp, leading her to wonder if it might be made out of a real pastry covered in resin, rather a 100% plastic product made from a mold.

To find out, @froginahatgirl did what any sane person would do: She broke the lamp in half and took a bite. “It’s literally fucking food,” she declared a few seconds later.

The video immediately went viral and currently has 14.8 million views. A bunch of tabloids and online publications picked it up, and Temu appears to have since removed the croissant lamp from its website. (You can still find similar products for sale on sites like AliExpress and Shein.)

This bizarre saga made some viewers paranoid that other food-shaped items they had bought on Temu could also secretly be edible. “NOO BC I BOUGHT A SHRIMP KEYCHAIN FROM TEMU,” wrote one commentator.

The truth is that the croissant lamp @froginahatgirl received likely isn’t the result of a Temu trying to cut corners, and it certainly wouldn’t be cost-effective for suppliers to make keychains out of actual shrimp (just look at what happened to Red Lobster).

Instead, the croissant lamp is something much more mundane: a dupe. For almost a decade, a Japanese artist named Yukiko Morita has been selling lamps crafted out of real baked goods under the brand name Pampshade. She came up with idea when she worked at a bakery and witnessed “how much unsold bread was thrown away,” Vogue reported in 2018.

At the top of Pampshade’s website currently, there’s a warning telling buyers to avoid purchasing counterfeit versions of its products that may not be properly sealed and disinfected. “Pampshades are not sold on any e-commerce sites like Amazon, Alibaba and eBay,” the company notes.

This isn’t the first time an innovative small business has seen its designs ripped off by a major e-commerce platform, and it sadly won’t be the last. But the cursed Temu croissant lamp is also indicative of another, more sinister problem arising as sites like Temu, Shein, and Amazon scale up and their catalogs balloon to include millions of different items.

A few decades ago, the most commonly counterfeited goods were logo-heavy handbags from storied European fashion houses like Chanel and Louis Vuitton. When you came across one of these fakes, it was usually clear what brand they were copying, and if you could afford it, where to get the original.

Thanks to the internet, social media, and the sheer scale of global e-commerce, even the smallest indie brands are now seeing counterfeit versions of their designs pop up online. And in many cases, the people buying these items aren’t aware of basic facts about them, like where they came from, or, in this case, why they were made using certain kinds of materials.

Of course, it’s not like every H&M shopper needs to know whether the cute $39.99 jacket in their shopping cart was originally seen on a Saint Laurent runway. But as the goods people consume become increasingly divorced from their original contexts, I worry that’s only making us more alienated from supply chains.

If you think about it for a second, it’s absurd to imagine that a factory boss in China woke up one day and realized he could save a few cents by making his plastic novelty lamps out of food. The real story probably began when a data analyst noticed Google searches for “croissant lamp” were spiking, perhaps after a popular YouTuber attempted to recreate some of Morita’s iconic designs late last year.

The data analyst then shared her findings with her bosses at Temu (or another e-commerce platform) and, in as little as a few days, a handful of third-party suppliers in China began making cheap lamps out of real croissants. A human—hopefully wearing a mask to avoid breathing in poisonous fumes—got paid a few cents for each dozen they dipped into a vat of resin and then placed on a drying rack. They probably never expected that in the future, a girl in Australia would film herself breaking one in half and taking a bite.

The Deal with Chinese EVs

The US House of Representatives just wrapped up so-called “China Week,” during which it passed of some two dozen pieces of legislation designed to “protect Americans against the military, economic, ideological, and technological threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.” One of those bills was the “End Chinese Dominance of Electric Vehicles in America Act,” a misleadingly named measure that would restrict consumers from using tax credits to buy American cars manufactured with battery technology licensed from Chinese firms.

For Big Technology, I wrote about why this is a terrible idea and how partnering with Chinese companies could actually make it easier for American carmakers to compete in the global market:

As part of my reporting, I went to China and rode in a bunch of new EVs made by some of the country’s top automakers, including BYD, Nio, Leapmotor, and Xpeng. I had to travel all that way because, despite Congress’s desire to “end the dominance” of Chinese electric car makers in the US, they have essentially no presence there. That’s unlikely to change any time soon, since the Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs earlier this year.

After experiencing these cars in person, I can see why companies like Ford and Tesla may be worried about their future. But I also came away believing that it’s completely possible for American carmakers to remain globally competitive— at least if their own government doesn’t get in the way.

Links You May Also Like

• Biden Targets Shein, Temu with New Rules to Curb Alleged ‘Abuse’ of US Trade Loophole (CNBC) The White House wants to prevent Shein and Temu from sending packages directly to customers in the US duty-free. Under a trade rule known as de minimis, Americans currently can import up to $800 worth of products from almost anywhere in the world, which is what allows US tourists to bring back souvenirs from Europe, order a vintage Gucci bag from Japanese eBay, and participate in many other forms of global commerce without needing to worry about paying customs duties. The Biden administration is now trying to find ways to preserve the positive things about de minimis while also ensuring Temu, Shein, and other companies that ship directly from China don’t flood the country with millions of packages that are hard to monitor.

• Support for a US TikTok Ban Continues to Decline (Pew Research Center) Only 32% of Americans now support banning TikTok, down from 50% in March 2023, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. 28% oppose the idea, up from 22% last year. The largest group of people, 39%, said they are uncertain about whether the government should get rid of the app, up from 28% in 2023. Given these statistics, it’s not exactly surprising that neither Donald Trump or Kamala Harris have made banning TikTok a major talking point of their presidential campaigns. Both candidates also have prominent official accounts on the app with millions of followers (Trump has roughly double as many as Kamala).

• The Mysterious, Meteoric Rise of Shein (The Atlantic) This piece mostly rehashes existing reporting about Shein published over the last few years, but journalist Timothy McLaughlin did manage to unearth some new interesting details about the company. The most eyebrow-raising incident concerns a 2022 Bloomberg investigation, which found Shein had illegally imported cotton to the US from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang where American officials say goods are produced using forced labor. McLaughlin reports that Shein secretly accessed the Bloomberg reporter’s customer account and independently tested the same cotton items she had as part of an effort to “prove privately to Washington lawmakers that the reporting was false.”

• Alibaba’s US Expansion Hinges On Wooing Mom-and-Pop Shops (Rest of World) Temu proved that a Chinese e-commerce platform could find widespread success in the US, and now, Alibaba wants to woo American consumers too. The company says its international shopping marketplace, AliExpress, currently has eight million users in the US, while Temu has around six times that number. Earlier this month, Alibaba hosted a conference in Las Vegas that Rest of World reports drew 2,000 attendees, ranging from farm owners to jewelry distributors. Kuo Zhang, the president of Alibaba.com, told the publication that the company’s “target customers are very different,” from Shein and Temu’s, but didn’t elaborate about in what ways. He also praised the US for its “stable policy environment compared with many other places.”

• Are Japan’s Amazon Drivers at Their Breaking Point? (Unseen Japan) A popular new Japanese movie highlights the toll that Amazon’s next-day delivery service takes on workers in the country. “Last Mile” begins when a package from a fictional online shopping giant called Daily Fast explodes after arriving at a run-down apartment complex. The film satirizes Amazon’s famous Leadership Principles, depicting how employees can weaponize them for their own benefit. Unseen Japan writer Jay Allen, who himself is a former Amazon Web Services employee, concluded that the movie’s portrayal is accurate: “My colleagues and I would often complain over drinks about how people used the Leadership Principles, not to further discussion, but to shut it down.”