What's Up: Super Contentious, Our Ladies

by James Sanders 11. December 2009 14:45

There's a super sticky point that we're dealing with at the moment, both with users of the site and internally within the team. Most of our feedback to date has been fairly positive, and the constructive stuff usually has been consistent. But there is one issue that has split everyone down the middle ...

Sarah looks like this ... And a lot of us like her, and a lot of us don't. We thought we'd settle it on our blog once and for all. I'd genuinely like to think that is's a dedication to user experience and not out-right chauvinism that makes me vouch for Sarah. We get some annoyed emails that just think it's ridiculous we have provocative women on our site. They ask us what if their kids came across it? First, your kids are looking at stuff a lot worse that this image of Sarah. And why would your kids be coming to a site for design-it-yourself custom men's dress shirts. We have Sarah because she is beautiful, and beautiful women have always gone hand-in-hand with stylish guys. Think of GQ ...

There have been criticisms that have been thoroughly thought-out and logical about how there is an objectification of women through what we do, women being buyers for their boyfriends and husbands, and us actually doing ourselves a disservice. This is tough argument for us to counter. All we know is that about 10% of customers are in fact women, and would that be 20% or 30% if we didn't have our images, maybe. What makes it difficult of course is that guys give us great kudos and say they love the look and feel of the Blank Label site. And our ladies are an important part of that. Now no guy is consciously going to say that their not going to buy a shirt from us because we took down our women, but our goal is to build the most compelling user experience from the site, the custom men's dress shirt design application, the couple of touch points whilst you wait for your shirt to turn up, the out-of-box experience, and the stories you tell to your friends about the awesome custom men's dress shirt that you designed.