Fake Icon Mugs
Scroll to the bottom of this page for Starbucks Fake Icon Guide
Bottom of the fake Guatemala mug
Bottom of the Hungary mug I bought at Starbucks in Budapest
I made pictures of a fake and an original Guatemala mug next to each other. Can you tell which one is the genuine mug?
Beware, it is unbelievable but true, there are fake Starbucks Icon mugs in circulation. Don't worry, if you buy your mugs in a Starbucks store, it is guaranteed that you have a genuine mug. But mugs bought on Ebay, can be counterfeit; especially when bought in China.
I saw a Geneva and United Arab Emirates Icon Mug together for US$ 50 (shipping included) on Ebay in march 2013. The seller used the following names song_cy / SongChuanYan (NanJing) / CHINA.N.J.shop. I thought, what can go wrong? And I ordered the two mugs.
When they arrived, the United Arab Emirates Mug was replaced by a Guatemala mug. When I studied the bottoms of the mug and compared them to a mug I bought in a Starbucks Store in Hungary I saw a few anomalies:
The letter “S” should be lowercase but is in a few situations bigger as the other lowercase letters. In “Starbucks”, “All Rights Reserved”, “Dishwasher”
The slash is connected with the “z”;
The 4 is bold. The 7 is smaller than the 4 and the 3.
The left one is the genuine mug!
There are a lot of other differences - the fake mug is a few millimeters smaller than the original Starbucks mug.
Genuine mug: the positioning of "Starbucks Coffee" towards "Guatemala". The first "S" is under the "M". The last "S" is not under the "M".
Fake mug: the positioning of "Starbucks Coffee" towards "Guatemala". The first "S" is not under the "M". The last "S" is under the "M".
Genuine mug: fine lines in the arch.
Fake mug: the lining of the arch is messy.
Genuine mug: there is no line in the door.
Fake mug: there is an extra line in the door.
Genuine mug: big spacing between Guatemala and Starbucks Coffee and bigger spacing between the letters of Guatemala.
Fake mug: small spacing between Guatemala and Starbucks Coffee and smaller spacing between the letters of Guatemala.
Geneva mug
If you compare the postioning of the word Geneva on the front of fake mug with a original mug, you can also see some differences. The "e" and "v" of Geneva on the fake mug have a different place towards the water jet.
SKU-stickers
In the past a SKU sticker on the bottom of a mug was a guarantee that mug was a genuine Starbucks product. Nowadays even the SKU stickers are reproduced - stay alert!
More Infomation on fake Starbucks icon mugs
Martin Kanz collected more information on fake Starbucks Mugs. With his permission I inserted below the PDF-file he made.
Relief mugs
In 2016 the first fake relief mugs surfaced.
Starbucks Icon Mug Fake Guide_V3.0_150627.pdf
Last update: 2023.12.23
Created: 2013.08.12
