British fashion firm sorry for Twitter blunder over US Aurora cinema massacre
As America reeled from the Aurora cinema massacre yesterday, a British online fashion store caught it in the neck with this tasteless tweet: #Aurora is trending, clearly about our Kim K inspired #Aurora dress;) shop celebboutique.com/aurora/whire-p…
The Tweet that caused a storm
With 12 people dead in the Colorado cinema tragedy, shot by a lone gunman as the Batman movie started to roll, furious tweets rained down on the hapless retailer.
Across America, tweeters raged that the British firm was using the Dark Knight massacre to promote their Aurora dress. And that was what it looked like.
Stunned, Celebboutique quickly tweeted that the tweeter in fact had no idea why #Aurora was trending and apologised- again and again.
On their website the company said under a headline that read UNRESERVED APOLOGY FOR AURORA TWEET:
"Celebboutique wish to offer their unreserved apologies for the huge distress and offence it has caused with the Aurora tweet. "We were extremely careless and sloppy in not checking the details of the trending article and wrongly assumed that it related to something entirely different. The person responsible for the tweet was not aware of the situation in the USA at the time and would never have made the tweet if they had been. We are all utterly devasted and horrified at the mistake. There was never any intention to capitalise on this dreadful tragedy and this was a genuine and honest mistake, the like of which will not happen again.
"There are no words to describe how sorry we are for our error and we again offer our sincere apologies to both the families of the victims and to the American public at large for this appalling error. We hope that we can be forgiven for this dreadful but genuine mistake."
The swift reply from unforgiving tweeters was that was that it would one have taken two seconds to find out why #Aurora was trending.
On the website itself a search for "Kim Kardashian Aurora" reported,"No products found". The dress had vanished .
But later in the day, a poll on Huffpo found Americans more forgiving than the angry tweeters. In the poll 47.15% found the original tweet "Totally offensive and tasteless." But 52.85% voted "No big deal -- it was probably a mistake."