Years ago, when I first moved to the USA from Canada, I noticed a huge drop in the level of customer service. Nordstrom was the only business that stood out as being different; this was a pleasant surprise. It has been easy to make the decision to encourage this behavior by shopping at Nordstrom as often as possible, until recently…
Early last month we noticed Nordstrom carried the Just Cavalli line. This was a very disappointing discovery. You can imagine finding out that the company you’re loyal to is supporting the immoral, hurtful, and disgraceful corporate behavior that has been displayed by the Roberto Cavalli company.
With #TakeOffJustLogo’s Twitter movement, it was only natural to reach-out to @Nordstrom and give them an opportunity to rectify the situation. After a few tweets & re-tweets, I noticed a reply to a fellow Sufi student. I hit the reply-all button and joined the conversation. Here is how the thread developed:
I was excited. I thought, “This is the level of service I’m used to. Thank you, Nordstrom. You’ve done it again.” I quickly sent a DM as requested and got a response. Here is that conversation:
As you can see in the DM convo, the next step was to send Ms. Mariani an email. Imagine my level of excitement. Finally! I’ve got a direct line to the head PR honcho for the Cavalli company. Surely she’ll have something useful to say. So with mixed emotions I sat down and wrote an email to Ms. Mariani. Here is that email:
Once I hit send I thought, “this company has ignored us completely. What is different about this time? I’m not going to get a response!” But deep down, I had hope that Ms. Mariani would pull through. After-all, the contact info came from Nordstrom, my favorite department store!
About 48hrs, as I was about to give-up, I saw ‘Angela Mariani’ in my inbox. “It worked! They responded!” I thought. But the excitement only lasted long enough for me to finish reading the response:
I was livid! “This lady is completely missing the point” I thought. I had to write her back but not before I calmed myself. I couldn’t believe that the CEO of a PR firm whose sole purpose is to maintain good relations with the public on behalf of her client was feeding me such BS! So I waited a few days and wrote her the following:
As I write this post, I’ve waited two weeks for a response. Maybe Ms. Mariani is also calming herself down before responding. But it’s more likely that she and the Roberto Cavalli company do not have anything useful to say about why they continue to hurt so many people around the globe. Every weekend there is a #TakeOffJustLogo protest taking place somewhere around the globe. Regardless of legalities the Roberto Cavalli company surely knows that so many are outraged by this yet they don’t seem to care.
I still have not lost my faith in Nordstrom. I believe in this company enough to continue to think that once Blake, Erik, and Pete Nordstrom hear about the story they will pull both Just Cavalli & Roberto Cavalli products off their shelves and website.
With that said, I am going to pause this story here and write the Nordstroms directly with the hopes that they still value their customers over money; something the Roberto Cavalli company obviously lacks in their ethics manual.
Here is Episode 2 – Continue reading