Joe Brown's

Our feminist society at university wrote to the online shop Joe Brown's this week to protest about a men's t-shirt they were selling which said "Beauty is only a dimmer switch away". When one of our members let us know about this, I suggested we write and complain, and so I drafted up an email and lots of our members sent it off:

To whom it may concern,

I am emailing to express my disappointment about the men's “Beauty Tee” (product code TS653), with the slogan “Beauty is only a dimmer switch away”, being sold on your website.

I find this product to be in very poor taste. The slogan quite clearly implies not only that the sole reason a man would want to be intimate with a woman would be if she was “beautiful”, but also that if a woman is not attractive enough, she does not even deserve to be looked at. It is important to note that Topman was recently selling similar products and suffered a serious backlash and dent to their reputation.

I am very disappointed that your company is willing to promote these attitudes by selling this t-shirt, and I would urge you to re-consider the decision to sell this item.

Yours,
[name]

A few days later, I received a very nice email from their Customer Service manager. I was very impressed, firstly that they had taken the time to read what we had written and write back, and secondly with their response:
 

Hello Hattie
 
May we begin by thanking you for taking the time to give us your feedback. Here at Joe Browns we believe that feedback is an instrument of great importance and so we do appreciate you taking the time to contact us with your thoughts on what we're doing, although we are truly very sorry for the circumstances under which you’re having to contact us.
 
In response to your comments, we would like to sincerely apologise for any offence that might have been caused by the tee that you’ve referred to within your email. We must stress to you that this is, of course, the very last reaction that we had wanted to provoke by selling the tee in question; Joe Browns is all about having fun and enjoying life as much as possible, at no one else's expense, we hasten to add. The very last thing that we would ever want to do is cause offence to anyone who might pick up our catalogue, or browse our website and so we're truly sorry if the tee in question has done just that.
 
Due to the fact that we do appreciate customer feedback here at Joe Browns, your comments have already been passed to all of the team members that it is directly relevant to (this includes our managing director and other directors of the firm). After discussing your email and the matter it concerns with our managing director and founder, he agrees that with hindsight we shouldn't have run the tee in question and truly regrets including it within the current collection; this tee isn’t really what Joe Browns is about or stands for and shouldn’t necessarily have been considered to be sold by Joe Browns. Ultimately it was our MD’s decision to include this tee within this season's collection, but looking back – whilst we must trust the judgement of our purchasing team and the decisions that they make – he now truly wishes that he had on this occasion been firmer and had rejected this tee from the proposed line up; he now totally appreciates the offence that might be taken from this line and realises that it’s not been designed in good taste. Joe Browns would never intentionally cause upset or offence through any of the products that we sell – our purchasing team simply thought that this tee would be a bit of fun to include within this season's catalogue, although we now realise that we have on this occasion made a faux pas.
 
We must stress that we’re not agreeing with the points that you’ve made within your email for the sake of doing so, or to ensure an easy ride; we agree with you because we do believe that we have on this occasion made a mistake and were wrong to include this tee in this season's collection. Furthermore, we wish to thank you again for contacting us; regardless of whether the feedback that is being given is in a positive light or not, we would always rather someone contacts us to discuss such matters with us than keep their thoughts to themselves, so thank you again for contacting us.
 
We have taken onboard the feedback that we've received and – whilst it might be not possible for us to withdraw this line from the current collection – you can be assured that Joe Browns has learnt from this mistake; we won't be running such lines again in the future. Nevertheless, may we once again sincerely apologise if any offence has been caused as a result of us selling the tee in question. We trust that from reading this response to your email that it will be clear that Joe Browns acknowledges the fact that we were on this occasion wrong to include this line within our latest collection, although we can only hope that this matter won't have reflected upon Joe Browns too badly.
 
Finally, as we’ve mentioned above, we do appreciate customer feedback and so we welcome you to contact us once again should you wish to comment on anything that’s been said above or should you have any further feedback that you might want to give.
 
Many thanks.
 
Kind regards
James Middleton
Customer Service Manager
 
 

Although they didn't actually say they would definitely withdraw the t-shirt, I felt the response was very genuine and polite. I'm very pleased with Joe Brown's.

www.joebrowns.co.uk