@sharingtheland wrote:
I take back my rapid "it must be fake" response, as in someone taking a piece of glass and trying to etch Waterford on the bottom. It could very easily be coming out of the back door of the Chinese Wateford-making-place. Like all of the designer bags that are almost but not quite correct.
My husband received a full set of expensive TaylorMade clubs from a businessman in China (we used to do a lot of business there and I have a closet of bizarre gifts - are they gold or are they not?). He gave them to someone else and the first time the someone else swung one of the clubs, the head flew off of the shaft.
They were produced at the TaylorMade plant but they weren't on the first line of production. Or second. Or third. More like the dark of night shift.
The real Waterford works in China does not have any apparatus for making molded glass. It could have been manufactured in the same neighborhood though! Or on a different floor in the same building. And there's no ruling out the possibility that a factory worker takes his expertise to another employer after hours.
I have some friends who went on a business trip in China and wanted to get some unique souvenirs that you can't buy in shops. They got a tour guide to take them shopping for fake Rolex watches. What they got was an incredible experience.
The guide dragged them by the arm through floor after floor of factories of every kind of fake imaginable, from plastic quartz movements with misspelled logos, all the way to clean rooms where workers were assembling clones that a jewelry store owner would have trouble telling from the real thing. They proceeded as far as they were comfortable before they felt that any further and the FTC would be lurking behind a door to bust them, and purchased some very nice watches that would fool anyone on the street.
Some districts in that part of the world deal exclusively in manufacturing fakes.
