Whoops

Quote :

"Man behind 'Carry On' T-shirts says company is 'dead' Michael Fowler acknowledges the severity of his mistake, but now worries it has doomed his small T-shirt company, including 5 workers in Worcester, Mass. Amazon, his company's main distribution channel, shut down his accounts following an uproar over highly offensive T-Shirts with messages of misogyny, murder and rape. Among them: "Keep Calm and Rape a Lot." This weekend, Fowler went from the typical 800 orders to just three. Now, he's worried Amazon won't pay him $40,000 for shirts already sold. Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) did not provide comment. Tight on cash, Fowler says his company, Solid Gold Bomb, can't last much longer. "We're dead in the water," Fowler said. "We have enough money to make payroll this Friday, and that's it." Related: You make $70k but cost your boss $88k Fowler thought he was just being innovative in 2011 when he had a computer program generate slogans that could be printed on T-shirts. Solid Gold Bomb's catalog went from 1,000 to more than 10 million, greatly increasing his chances of getting his wares in front of customers on Amazon. And there was no inventory risk, because he made the T-shirts only after a customer made his selection. "We migrated the business to be print on demand," he said. "It's a numbers game, a quantitative culture. It's never been about taking the time to develop a beautiful design." The catalog began with mostly innocuous sports-themed designs. Then early last year, he set his sights on reproducing versions of the British "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda poster of the Second World War era after hearing that a British company was attempting to trademark the phrase. Fowler says he wrote a computer program script that would take "Keep Calm" and randomly pair it with a verb and pronoun. He gathered 700 verbs and imported them en masse -- but says he didn't carefully go over the list. Fowler imagined phrases like "Keep Calm and Nurse On." He got those but also the disastrous results that also included "Keep Calm and Knife Her" and "Keep Calm and Hit Her." By Fowler's account, the shirts never existed. Only computer-generated images did. After being available for a full year, the effort blew up in his face Saturday morning. ..."

http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/smallbusiness/keep-calm-and-carry-on/

3/5/2013 8:51:28 PM

k

3/5/2013 8:52:57 PM

^this is the kind of quality post that keeps me coming back for more




Seems like a legit oversight; albeit, with deserved consequences.

3/5/2013 8:55:32 PM

you can't insert sarcasm into a post that was sarcastic to begin with :3

3/5/2013 8:58:04 PM

This is a dumb idea for a shirt anyway.

Also "hit her" is perfectly acceptable in some situations. Like if you are buying shirts for a women's lacrosse/rugby team.

[Edited on March 5, 2013 at 10:24 PM. Reason : ]

3/5/2013 10:24:13 PM

Quote :

"Related: You make $70k but cost your boss $88k"

Hey, fuck off man.

3/5/2013 10:29:36 PM

wonder what kind of other random ones the program came up with

"Keep Calm and Congratulate Them"

3/5/2013 10:34:10 PM

Keep calm and verb noun.

Amazon should reinstate his account assuming the story checks out.

3/6/2013 9:14:40 AM

More like:

KEEP
CALM
AND
CLOSE
SHOP

3/6/2013 9:20:20 AM

Keep Calm and Sell Crack

I'm Krallum and I approved this message.

3/6/2013 9:43:39 AM

So I guess dnl got a shirt in 3 different colors?

I'm Krallum and I approved this message.

3/6/2013 9:44:18 AM

3/6/2013 10:31:48 AM

KEEP
CALM

AND

3/6/2013 10:33:46 AM

Oh, yeah, rape. It's so funny. Until you been raped.

3/6/2013 11:09:17 AM