It was a niche product that turned Fuse Chicken, Fawcett’s company of half-a-dozen employees, into a quick success. Customers raved about Fawcett’s durable designs — until he started selling them on Amazon.

Fawcett’s customer reviews plummeted without warning. In came a deluge of one-star pans.

“Really bad quality,” read a description of an iPhone car charger in a review titled, “Broke in a week.”

Fawcett was dumbfounded. Then he found a clue in one of the reviews: a picture of a charger emblazoned with a Fuse Chicken logo that wasn’t quite right.

Over the following months, Fawcett placed numerous Amazon orders for his own merchandise. What he found would become the basis of a lawsuit he filed last year against Amazon.

Mixed in with Amazon’s inventory of authentic merchandise were crude copycats. Some looked like the real thing, but didn’t include Fuse Chicken’s name. Others bore the name, but weren’t made by his company, Fawcett said in an interview with The Times in his Ohio office.

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