As a customer of the original and deliberately offensive online T-Shirt store. Who certainly never had a problem with his wares causing this level of offense until one particular case.
I cant help but think the problem here wasn't so much the offensive shirt or the content. It was that he failed to realize that putting a t-shirt that has little old ladies chuckling and moms happily wearing it, next to a tshirt that say something that only >1% would wear with pride and more than >25% may take offense at, is inviting disaster.<p>I doubt people even saw the shirt directly, I bet it came up as a related product while they were buying something else on his store, and the suggestion that they may want to buy this shirt based on them buying another of his shirts was likely one of the primary causes of offense "I see you like <cute cat joke shirt> I sold you. Can I recommend you snatch a copy of this handsome <culturaly satirical rape joke> as well?"<p>That sort of thing tends to offend people. But I dont see why he didnt apply a flamethrower of purity all over the place. New Corp-Registration, new domain, new amazon seller account, new EVERYTHING, but this time, some sanity checks in that script. A few careful letters/calls to various services to make sure they know hes legit & what hes doing is means they are keeping a valuable customer. and then a wash of shiny new design and brand all over it. Meet the New company same as the old company.
I find these self-righteous social justice types very irritating. If they have a problem with offensive randomly generated shirts, how about they just ignore them?
<i>The images of offensive shirts were the result of a computer program that automatically generated random phrases and images. Fowler had used the program to expand his company catalog from 1,000 designs to more than 10 million, casual shirts with pithy one-liners like, "I mustache you a question."</i><p>Hard to believe there was no editorial oversight. On the other, hard to get to 10M designs with editorial oversight.
"The images of offensive shirts were the result of a computer program that automatically generated random phrases and images" - I simply don't buy this. Generating stuff randomly is one thing. Putting random stuff on display is another.