My Strange Search for the Origins of a Viral Coffee Cup
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It started with the stainless-steel ice cream bowls. My partner unpacked them when we moved in together — shiny, shallow dishes with thin stems that reminded me of a dessert coupe sold by chef Laila Gohar for $86 a pop. Nope, they told me: They’d bought the bowls from a model’s stoop sale, then later found the same ones on AliExpress.
The ice cream bowl was on my mind when I saw an Instagram ad for a coffee set from an Amsterdam-based brand called Soos Atelier. A double-walled espresso cup nested on a square saucer, complete with divots for a matching spoon. Chic, sleek, vaguely Bauhaus. One set cost $60, but the brand was running a special deal — two for the price of one, only while stock lasts.
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Then I started noticing the cup elsewhere on the internet: at home-goods stores in Riga and Stockholm, in the storefront of a DTC TV tray company, in the product shots of a Swedish soda-maker, at an L.A. boutique marketing it as “Brutalist stainless steel coffee cup set.” None of the stores claimed explicitly to have designed the cup, but if you unfocus your eyes and let the branding wash over you — ateliers and studios, artfully unstaged photos of messy tabletops — it would be natural to assume that you were on the website of a small design company that labored for months to create this very cool item, now being sold at a price that reflects that labor. But once I found it at other stores, it didn’t take long to find twins on AliExpress and Temu for around $5.
So who really makes this cup? I found two answers. The design originates not in Amsterdam or China but in Italy in the 1970s or ’80s with a company called Guido Bergna, makers of stainless-steel coffee gear still prized by vintage collectors. Guido Bergna produced a cup, saucer, and spoon set that is nearly identical to the model I’d seen across the internet, save for a small difference in the handle: The Guido Bergna cup’s is a flattened half-oval, and the internet cup’s is shaped like an ear. You can still find the vintage originals for around $60 a mug, about the same price as the contemporary dupe.
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Vintage Guido Bergna Espresso Cups
And the dupe I was seeing everywhere — where did it come from? I ordered one from Soos Atelier and a similar-looking model from AliExpress for $1.18; if they matched, I’d have a clue. They were close, but not the same — a different weight, small differences in the details. I kept looking, opening tab after tab after tab, until I found the Alibaba storefront of Jiangmen Wahming Metal Products, a manufacturer of stainless-steel kitchenware in China’s Guangdong Province.
I ordered an espresso cup from the factory (around $3 wholesale; a sample costs $5), and when it arrived, it was identical to Soos Atelier’s. Same smooth mirror finish, same weight, same handle, same bevel on the saucer. When I looked at Jiangmen Wahming’s storefront, that also appeared to be the case for Soos Atelier’s Shiloh plate ($45), which bears a striking resemblance to the manufacturer’s double-walled stainless plate ($3) or its Shiloh coffee pot ($45), a twin of this $6 carafe. Of 31 stainless-steel products in the Soos online shop, I found 21 with look-alikes in Jiangmen Wahming’s shop, including an egg holder, a sorbet coupe, and — of course — the stainless-steel ice cream bowls my partner had bought from the stoop sale. They cost $30 at Soos Atelier, $2 from the factory. (Neither Soos Atelier nor Jiangmen Wahming returned a request for comment.)
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It’s not just Soos Atelier; the cup is a viral product sold everywhere from Walmart to the fanciest design stores. It’s mind-bending to think of a decades-old Italian design being reproduced at a factory in China, then rebranded in Europe and sold at a markup to American consumers on Instagram. On some level, you can’t blame the sellers. This is the salesman’s talent: buying cheap and selling dear, creating a world that feels expensive around something that isn’t. The challenge comes when everyone performs the same trick — the audience learns the pattern, then grows suspicious, then bored, then they move on to something else.
More places to buy the cup
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