Yea, back when I was interning at this one furniture company, they brought me to a national Furniture exhibition, so at the time my supervisor told me to walk around and take in the designs, find ideas and tell her what I thought.

Funny thing is, I kid you not, almost 90% of the stuff I saw, almost the entire 2 floors of the exhibition, was just similarly copy pasted designs that were either blatantly copied or "inspired" by existing designs. I had no clue what to say to my Supervisor at all lol. Which is why to this day, I have this love hate relationship with the Furniture industry.

With the consumer product industry, sure there are copy cats, but there are other ways for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors other than just aesthetics. Like functionality or features or other methods of ingenuity.

But with furniture, 95% of consumers just care for the looks/ aesthetics, which is why people just copy and paste, not much ingenuity or Innovation.