On January 8th, an exceedingly large number of shoppers came upon a new children’s line posted on the company’s website. Many who purchase items from the company include not only parents of young children and teens, but also celebrities. G-Eazy, American rapper and producer, tweeted that morning expressing how disappointed he was with the company that he had previously had a contract with to sell his merchandise. He claimed he was ending his partnership with the company due to an “offensive” post on the H&M website. He discovered an image the company posted of a little boy wearing a sweatshirt that said, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” Many took this as racist and H&M quickly apologized for the misconception of the new item.
Some feel that the whole situation was overblown and should not have been taken so seriously and that the company only sees children as children, excluding any racial standpoint. Renee Solis, a junior at Riverbend, agrees with how the situation was taken out of hand by being blasted on social media. Solis said, “I didn’t think the post was offensive, but some people take thing straight to being a minority.” The image wasn’t purposefully exposed on the website to cause feelings of race being taken into matter. Viany Ortiz, junior said, “If I were to look at the photo without the comments I would not have noticed how others were seeing the pictures.”
There were Youtube videos, Twitter posts, Instagram posts, and more based off of this photo. Shoppers were very disappointed with the way the company chose to show their new product. The question now is, will this affect future sales? Will H&M possibly go out of business?
In Spotsylvania Towne Centre, there was a future plan to construct H&M into our local mall. Now this controversy makes business expansion difficult. The company hasn’t currently pulled back any of their stores or said anything about decrease in sales, but for future reference we may not get a company like this to be present in our community! The whole situation was al strung out and many others agree, like Emily Kennedy, junior.
If someone was to go to any H&M social media and click on the links in the companies’ bio, it would send them directly to a sincere apology from the company. H&M said, “To all customers, staff, media, stakeholders, partners, suppliers, friends and critics. We would like to put on record our position in relation to the image and promotion of a children’s sweater, and the ensuing response and criticism. Our position is simple and unequivocal – we have got this wrong and we are deeply sorry. Please accept our humble apologies.” Kennedy said, “I think the company made a sincere apology and it should not affect future sales.”