Natural Fashion | Review

Do you ever do something without thinking too much about it, thinking all is going well, that you're doing the right thing, only for it to turn into a complete nightmare? That seems to happen to me quite a lot.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been dealing with a wholesaler of organic cotton clothing in Australia. They asked me to review one of their t-shirts and I agreed. They then wanted to advertise on my site, great I thought, so they paid me for 3 months advertising and I put up their banner ad. Then they wanted me to exclusively sell their organic cotton toys through my site. Great again. 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 would have added a couple of hundred dollars a month to my income, which would have grown over the next couple of years.

So I wrote a couple of posts about them, one of which got picked up by Treehugger, the number one 'green' site. That was great exposure and great to get a link from a PR 7 website. Things were going really well, too well.

So then I wrote the Natural Fashion review. This is where the not thinking too much part comes in. I cover the item one point at a time. I mention the quality of the fabric, how it washed, how it ironed, that kind of thing. Then I mentioned that I didn't really like the colour. 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 people at Natural Fashion found out they went crazy. Demanding to know how I was going to sell their products with such a negative review. Good point. The problem is I wrote what I thought was right. 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 rubbish. Who in their right mind would wear those dresses? If you want to see them just search for natural fashion in Australia. I won't waste a link to them.

I said it wasn't that bad, it was just the review of one top after all, it wasn't a sales page. I agreed to add a few more positive points but not to change what I wrote. They emailed me analysing each paragraph, highlighting all the negative things I said. That was a shock. I was pretty pissed off by their attitude. 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, 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.

That last point is pretty ridiculous and there's no way I'll be doing that. Why should I? I didn't go to all that trouble to just have to remove the post. Plus I want my visitors to see how stupid those people are - Renata and Doug Giles that is. I'll mention their name just in case they have a Google alert set up for themselves, I'm sure they'd be happy to read this ;)

The brilliant thing is now if you search for natural fashion in google.com.au, the second listing is my review post. So most people searching for them and see all the crap I wrote about them. Don't you just love blogs? With a bit of luck this post will show up too :)

So yeah, I probably lost a bit of money but who cares; there are other organic clothing suppliers around. The last thing I need is to work with morons like those at Natural Fashion.