Abstaining: companies I won’t purchase from

Posted on Saturday, at • 5266 views

Abstaining: companies I won’t purchase from

There are many reasons I don’t purchase from companies: their products don’t work well for me, I find products that I prefer elsewhere, their products are fine but others offer very similar items at a lower cost to me. Everyone has companies like that.

And then there are companies that I will actively avoid. The companies have behaved badly toward their customers. I’m not talking about companies that sell raw ingredients and don’t charge too much more for them. I’m not talking about companies that just sell lower-quality products (like Tinkerbelle makeup, which is not all that great a quality…but it’s aimed at preteen girls who want to play dress-up) or even companies - usually indie companies - that shut down temporarily. I’m talking about companies that have actively and repeatedly engage in Really Bad Behavior. They may knowingly sell products that do not meet FDA guidelines. They may take orders and not deliver products. They may - not once, but repeatedly - verbally abuse their clients. They may create and maintain cults of personality aka sick systems. They may start to get in over their heads, but they keep taking orders and they stop delivering the items paid for. The reasons for putting a company on this page vary; and companies may be removed from the page if there is a genuine change or attempt to make things right.

Doe Deere / Limecrime — setting aside some less-than-forthright methods to establish her various enterprises (target already-successful people in her chosen arena and then attempt to replicate that person’s look/style/business model), Xenia has a long history of non-smooth interactions with clients. Yet she still stays the public face of all her companies. Xenia doesn’t seem to be growing as a person or learning from her mistakes. She repeatedly belittles her customers’ intelligence, while still continuing to pump out products and expand her cult of personality. From reading the occasional review here and there, it seems like she’s selling better-quality products than she was three years ago, and has improved the quality of some of her others (and no longer adds straight-mica eyeshadows to her lineup.) But she continues to treat customers and affiliates as if she’s granting them a huge favor by allowing them to participate in the expansion of her business, as if buying items from her or promoting her products should be a much-vanted privilege. Yeah…no. It’s not a privilege, she’s creating a sick system. (further reading, links updated May 8 2014: a history and more)

Sinful Colors — Sinful Colors was caught red-handed using bloggers’ photos in PR material without prior permission…and certainly without crediting the bloggers in question. Setting aside for the moment the fact that their PR materials were misrepresenting a water-marble manicure as something one could do with brushes, and that a nail-stamping manicure could be achieved using toothpicks, they handled the situation very poorly when called out on it: their headquarters tried to use the “it was done by an intern” excuse, then they made a deal with the bloggers in question to remove the original protest articles. Then, as part of their “fix”, they again photshopped a manicure onto a model - who knows where these photos came from, or if the polish used was even from the Sinful Colors lineup - and sent that around. This was in fall 2012, and I haven’t heard recurrences of this happening. So it’s possible that Sinful Colors is being more careful about how it creates its promotional imagery. Possible. But the fact that they made a deal with the two originally-stolen-from bloggers to remove the original posts showcasing the stolen photos…kind of stinks. Own up to the mistake, let the original posts stand with an addendum that the imagery in question was removed, correct the misleading statements in your promo material about how the manicures can be achieved…and then move on. Don’t try and act like it didn’t happen. It just makes people wonder where else you may have lied and covered it up. (The parent company, Revlon, appeared to handle the matter with a bit more grace and tact. Sinful Colors screwed up. This, coupled with the fact that their polishes aren’t that much better than similarly-priced ones from Sally Hansen or L.A. Girl, mean that I won’t buy or use Sinful Polishes. (Further reading: search results for “Sinful Colors using blogger photos”)

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