Lately I’ve been working with (or against?) an Australian company who sells organic cotton clothing. They asked me to review one of their t-shirts and I agreed without thinking too much about it. My site is about organic products available in Australia so the topic was perfect. Of course I planned to write an honest review but what were they expecting? A glowing positive review no doubt.
When I write reviews about products, it is usually about products which I have bought myself. No, it always is. I have never had someone send me a free gift before, asking that I review it. It seemed fair enough. I didn’t feel any conflict when I wrote the review. I review it honestly, as I did with all the other sites and products I looked at. Unfortunately for them, I don’t like their website or their women’s clothing. So they got a pretty negative review. Clearly they weren’t too happy about that.
The company is called Natural Fashion and they are based in Sydney, although their organic cotton products come from Brazil. You can read the Natural Fashion review which I wrote in about 5 well thought out minutes. Yeah, I could and and probably should have put more time into it. I’m so busy though. I never expected it to create so much trouble. I honestly thought it was fair, even if it wasn’t positive. That’s all they could ask for, surely?
When I showed them the Natural Fashion review, they emailed me analysing each paragraph I had written, highlighting in red all the negative things I said. I was pretty pissed off by that. Did they really think they could get away with it. Didn’t it occur to them that my website ranks much better than theirs so I can write whatever I like about them and loads of people will read about it. What did they think to gain by treating me like shit. Well, they got shit in return, that’s what.
So naturally I decided to have a bit of fun and updated the post with everything they said to me. They then demanded I remove all the images and logos about their site (even though they had given me permission to use them), including the banner ad they had paid for 3 months, that I remove all links to their site (meaning they would lose all traffic I was sending them; yes they are idiots), and that I remove all mention of their trademarked name, Natural Fashion. My pleasure I said. Well except for the point about their name. How stupid do they think I am?
The brilliant thing is now if you search for natural fashion, the second listing is my review post. The other great thing is that it doesn’t affect my business in any way. There are other organic clothing suppliers around after all. The last thing I need is to work with morons like those at Natural Fashion.
