Veronica Van, center, with her son Colm and daughter Elysia, the family team behind Lemonwood and their efforts to protect the products and artwork they’ve created.

Veronica Van never imagined that designing and manufacturing the Mini Minder for knitting and crochet enthusiasts would bring her face-to-face with an issue plaguing some of the world’s leading industries: the dreaded knockoff. Once thought of as a problem reserved for haute couture fashion houses, the cheap knockoff is now a frustrating and widespread threat to small entrepreneurs in the craft industry.

Van is the founder of Lemonwood, a Tucson, AZ-based company that invented the Mini Minder, a yarn holder on a wrist strap for yarn crafts on-the-go. Lemonwood is a family affair for Van – her son Colm designed the Mini Minder and creates the artwork on each piece while her daughter Elysia handles Lemonwood’s marketing. Although the team’s main focus is designing and manufacturing the Mini Minder and other tools, they’ve had to spend countless hours and funds trying to combat all the copycats.

Deliberate and Blatant Copying

Van, a former owner of Dream In Color Yarn, established Lemonwood in 2023. Not long after, fraudulent Mini Minders were popping up on sites like Temu, AliExpress, and Amazon. The knockoffs were outright copies using cheap materials, duplicating Lemonwood’s original art, with a price point a fraction of Lemonwood’s. Even more astonishing, these companies stole exact photos from Lemonwood’s product listings, photos Van herself took. For Van, a product that is in close proximity to the original is one thing, but an exact replica is something else entirely. In retrospect, Van says, “I handed the design right to them in the flat lay photos I first posted on Etsy. All they need is a product photo to copy the design.”

She set into motion as many protections as she could: she obtained copyright protection for the original artwork on the Mini Minders, she trademarked the Lemonwood logo, font, and other artwork, and she submitted and eventually secured a utility patent for the Mini Minder’s unique plate and stem. The process is not for the faint of heart – Van estimates she has spent upwards of $15,000 on legal fees and far too many hours to count on battling the copycats.

These efforts have stemmed the tide, but the copycats keep coming. To try to stay a step ahead of the companies violating Lemonwood’s copyrighted work, Van recently hired CoreSearch, an IP recovery company specializing in copyright infringement and takedown services. Although this adds another expense, she knows it’s critical to be vigilant. Fortunately, Van has not faced major issues with trademark and patent infringement for the Mini Minder.

Despite the time and money it takes away from growing her core business, Van feels she has no choice but to stand up to the copycats. “The stuff that’s coming from overseas is directly impacting our business because it’s so similar that people can’t tell the difference. It always feels a little bit like I’m a step behind the rip-off people.” Even more frustrating is the difficulty getting the sites to take down the knockoffs. Like an unsettling game of whack-a-mole, the sellers are elusive. According to Van, “We get one site shut down, but they put on a different mask and keep going.” Recently, in yet another iteration of the theft, there have been three attempts to clone the Lemonwood website.

In a blog post from 2025, Van relates how they partnered with a dedicated IP (intellectual property) enforcement agency:

“Their research uncovered something staggering: over 400 international companies were selling exact copies of our designs. When the team reviewed our case, they told us it was the worst they had ever seen, an overwhelming amount of theft from one small business.”