Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been dealing with an Australian company selling organic cotton clothing in Australia. They asked me to review one of their t-shirts and I was more than happy to do it. My site is about organic products and their stuff is exactly the kind of things my readers are looking for.
The company is called Natural Fashion and they are based in Chatswood in Sydney. You can read my Natural Fashion review here. They wanted to advertise on my site with a banner ad. They offered to pay me $15 per month. Yeah, next to nothing but I don’t have that many visitors so I agreed. The paid for 3 months in advance. Then they wanted me to sell their organic cotton toys through my site. Great, why not. It was to be an exclusive arrangement and my site ranks pretty well for organic cotton toys, althought not too many people are searching for that. Then they wanted me to exclusively sell all their products through my site. What more could I have asked for. I was to get 10% on all sales. While I didn’t expect to make loads of money through them, it could have lead to quite a bit over the long term.
So I wrote a couple of posts about them, one of which got picked up by Treehugger the top site in my niche. That was great exposure which drove quite a bit of traffic to my site and gave me a PR 7 link to my site which will really help my overall rankings.
So then I wrote the Natural Fashion review. I covered the item they sent me one point at a time. I mentioned the quality of the fabric, how it washed, how it ironed, that kind of thing. Then I made the mistake of mentioning that I didn’t really like the colour. Well, it was a mistake if I wanted to continue to be in business with them. It’s that natural, undyed colour which probably only suits half the population. It doesn’t suit me and I said so. I then mentioned the crappy, old fashioned designs. I tried to be nice about it and did mention that not all the designs were rubbish but I was in trouble.
When the idiots at Natural Fashion found out they went crazy. Demanding to know how I was going to sell their products with such a negative review. The problem is I wrote what I thought was the case. I don’t like their crappy website and their crappy clothes. Sure the organic toys are pretty cute as are the children’s clothes but the women’s stuff is just awful. I mentioned that my grandmother wears that kind of stuff but in fact, she’s much more stylish than that. Who in their right mind would wear those hideous outfits? If you want to see them just search for natural fashion in Australia. I won’t waste a link to them.
I was happy with what I wrote, even if it did only take me 5 minutes. However, I did agreed to add a few more positive points but not to change what I wrote. They emailed me analysing each paragraph, highlighting in red all the negative things I said. I was pretty pissed off by that. I tell you they pissed off the wrong person. My website ranks much better than theirs so I can write whatever I like about them and loads of people will read about it.
So naturally, I updated the post with everything they said to me. That sure made them angry as if they weren’t before. They then demanded I remove all the images and logos about their site, including the banner ad they had paid for, that I remove all links to their site (meaning they would lose all traffic I was sending them; yes they are stupid), and that I remove all mention of their trademarked name, Natural Fashion. My pleasure I said.
The point about their name ridiculous and there’s no way I’ll be doing that. Did they think they would scare me off by saying I don’t have permission to use their name. So what. It’s my blog. I can say what shitty products they have if I want to. That’s my opinion after all.
The brilliant thing is now if you search for natural fashion, the second listing is my review post. LOL. So most people searching for them and see all the crap I wrote about them. Don’t you just love the internet. Didn’t it occur to them that I would write about what they said to me? Did they think I would apologise for writing an honest review? Didn’t they think that their potential customers will read the crap I wrote about them? They’re surely not going to get new customers out of this.
It doesn’t affect my business in any way. There are other organic clothing suppliers around. The last thing I need is to work with morons like those at Natural Fashion.
