Online retailer Zazzle.com has recently been strongly criticized because they decided to use white women to take part in their selling of “Black Girl Magic” T-shirts on their website campaign.
The company, whose mission is to give people the power to make anything imaginable, is well-known for its policy that allows people to customize their own clothes according to their tastes or needs. Recently, Zazzle found itself being called out by an eagle-eyed Twitter user called @jackieaina who was for good reason quite surprised by what she found. Her first reaction, of course, was to make this perceived racism issue known by a lot of people.
So, she immediately took a picture from their website and put it on Twitter. Soon her tweet was retweeted by hundreds of confused, angered and outraged people at the company’s strange way of promoting a campaign which is dedicated to “celebrate the beauty, power, and resilience of black women.”
Company’s reaction? Their explanation was that their products are hosted through an e-commerce platform, but the online marketplace system is computerized and pairs those products with random models. So, in this case, the fault may be with their computerized system which just happened to pair the wrong items with the wrong models for a particular clothes campaign. But the fact that the default model seems to be white makes people consider an important number of questions that online retailers might want to think about for the future.
Zazzle has come under Fire
The news spread quickly after a woman tweeted a picture from their website.
People were not so happy with the company’s mistake, especially when this campaign Black Girl Magic is a term used to illustrate the universal awesomeness of black women. According to Huffington Post, "If we had to nail down a definition, we'd say: Black Girl Magic is a term used to illustrate the universal awesomeness of black women.
It’s about celebrating anything we deem particularly dope, inspiring, or mind-blowing about ourselves."
But the funny thing is, there aren’t many black women in those pictures. Needless to say, the internet got mad.
A Note from inside
An updated note came from Nicole Whitson, designer of the Stylnic shop via Zazzle, she said in an email to HuffPost Canada that designers get "a selection of models to choose from when I upload my designs to Zazzle."
"They have always offered black women and men models to choose from when you make your design public and ready to purchase.
So the onus would be on the actual designer themselves to make the selection," she continued.
However, she noted there "are not a vast selection of models in general, as this is a print-on-demand site."
More importantly, for Whiston, she would like to see more people support black talent.
"Instead of focusing on model selection, let's support black designers and purchase their products on this site and others," she says.
