Under the new legislation, retailers selling unlicensed copies – whether classics or bog-standard bog seats – will be liable to fines or jail up to ten years."
This is usually because many replica companies are solely online businesses, hence do not pay showroom costs and many also manufacture their furniture abroad.
[3] This gained media attention as customers lost thousands of pounds on unfulfilled orders, while many of the company’s staff’s wages went unpaid.
In 2014 one company initiated the set-up of the Replica Furniture Association in response to the negative press coverage surrounding the closures of Ikon M and Infurn.
The goal of the association was to establish a collective of reproduction furniture companies, each of whom must abide by a strict code of ethics to be considered for membership.