Saturday 17 July 2010

Ginger + Liz: Big Bullies

Hi everyone. I'm sorry my blog is a bit of a big, ranty, grumpy place at the moment but some things have to be shared.

Ginger + Liz are a brand I knew very little about. I'd seen their polishes only really on Dailypolish's blog and not thought much of them. Some of the polishes looked very pretty, but didn't really capture my imagination. Still Sara had said good things about their formula and I may well have bought from them someday, especially if the polish frenzy i have been experiencing recently had continued.
But now i can safely say i will NEVER purchase from them.

They are threatening to sue Sara because of 2 posts she did comparing some of their polishes to Diamonds Cosmetics.

Now you can see there is barely any text, she doesn't state that the polishes are repackaged, she says they are identical and that she is disappointed, implying that she believes they may have been repackaged.
So now Ginger + Liz say they are going to sue for upwards of $200000 if she does not delete the post and all the comments. It's ridiculous and nothing but bullying to try and scare bloggers away from saying anything negative.
Sara bought the polishes herself and was disappointed to find they look the same as the cheaper Diamond brand.

I am going to be writing to the brand to tell them how disappointed I am with them. Even if they were the best polishes in the entire world, Sara was wrong and they weren't even close to DC and she had specifically stated that they were repackaged it would still be hideously wrong to threaten to sue. A blog is someone's personal opinion, other people will disagree (even in Sara's comments there are people who think the swatches look different) and by reacting like this Ginger + Liz have done their own reputation a lot more damage than Sara ever could have done.
In fact before this i had seen Sara's post and thought the polishes being compared looked slightly different. Now they've reacted such a way makes them seem like they have something to hide as well and i will be looking much further into the other claims of repackaging.

Doing this sort of thing is just plain stupid in my opinion. If i was a company and did NOT repackage but someone was saying i did i would address them, show evidence and be civil. Perhaps even offer to send them another polish with no dupe so they could see. Take photos in different lights showing the differences, discuss differences in ingredients etc etc but be sure to be friendly and, even if it's not true, say you are thankful to the blogger for bringing the criticism to your attention and so on. If i was a company who DID repackage i would keep my big yap shut, this way even i a few people saw the post it would not spread around as much.
I guess i shouldn't be giving advice to repackers but it just seems so incredibly stupid to threaten to sue (they would never win, Sara said nothing defamatory , just her assessment based on what she saw) if they hadn't I would never have seen, and would not be posting this now for you to see.

13 comments:

  1. Ew, companies sueing their consumers? They obviously don't know much about business.

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  2. OMG! I think this is just plain stupid! Do they do not know that the blogger world is very connected and that this is such a perfect way to kill their reputation?
    And besides comparing nail polishes is very common in nail polish blogs! It reminds me of dramaqueen Xenia ...

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  3. P.S. I told you we're really connected ;)
    http://polishinsomniac.blogspot.com/2010/07/as-wise-blogger-once-told-me-you-go.html

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  4. Yep, I will never be buying from them. They have hurt their reputation tremendously.

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  5. oh wow. That's excessive and ridiculous. From the pictures, I dont think they look completely identical but certainly similar enough that i'd probably rather go with the cheaper polish, myself... but SUING over THIS!? What a bunch of morons... Congrats, you've ruined your own company!!

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  6. I just read about what was going on and I'm SO disappointed. Threatening to sue Sara has done more damage to the company than anything else. I'm definitely not buying from them.

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  7. How to press your self-destruct button with one quick email! Stoo-pid.

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  8. ...Wtf?! Smacks of idiocy. Oh well, they've just buggered themselves a bit, haven't they? And $2000,000 dollars? I'm sorry, but they weren't going to get that much money in sales from the followers of that blog, were they? Silly company.

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  9. Some overzealous higher-up somewhere in the company either jumped the gun, or they do resell private-label items and -=really=- don't want people to know about it.

    Ginger + Liz' reaction sounds very much like they've got something to hide. If they just made a similar nail polish color as another brand - even an inexpensive brand - well, hey, it does happen. Bloggers compare polishes all the time from Essie, OPI, China Glaze, and dozens of other manufacturers who definitely do not repackage or resell private-label items. People have found similarities between those polishes - so one identical polish/eyecolor/lip color/et cetera does not 100% identify a repacker. It does let people know "if you are in love with XYZ color, you can get the same effect for less by buying this item from vendor 123."

    Whether they repack or not, Ginger + Liz' reaction is quite interesting. If they don't resell private-label items, there are so many different ways they could have calmly refuted any implications that they repack - including doing their own photos, showing the packaging, showing other polishes in their line that are not like anything Diamond Cosmetics has in their line. Instead, they did this.

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  10. 'Haha, she's just a small ickle blogger! Let's send her a badly worded email using big words and her simple little mind will be scared into taking down the posts!'

    Never will they get a penny of my polish budget.
    Douches.

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  11. $200,000? So one blogger deprived them of sales of 10,000 bottles of polish? How do they expect to prove that?

    Bullies is right. And yes, they are having as if they have something to hide.

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  12. As a blogger who's been threatened with a cease and desist letter in the past, I'm disgusted by this sort of thing. You can be sure G+L will never see any of my money. How horrible. I feel so bad for anyone who gets treated the way that blogger Sara was treated.

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