Halifax — When Joe Smith, senior advisor on customer relations for Fashun4ward, saw the many poor reviews on the clothing brand’s website, he knew something had to be done.
“After reading so many one-star reviews, I immediately scheduled meetings with our retail employees within the province to evaluate the extent of these customer complaints,” Smith told The Manatee. “What we found was that most complaints were on the poor quality of the clothing: how the shirts pilled in the wash and the threading easily came undone after a few wears, things like that.”
Smith said that this led his team to install the new customer-child worker outreach program.
“It is not very fair for head office, or even our underpaid retail workers, to have to deal with product quality issues when these people are so far down the fashion supply chain. Here at Fashun4ward, we value accountability, so it is only right that the children working in our factories in India and Bangladesh, i.e., the ones who made the faulty products in the first place, are held accountable for their subpar work.”
The new customer service model will work as follows: whenever a customer has a complaint in regards to the quality of a purchased garment, Fashun4ward’s customer relations team will track the sweatshop via a barcode on the clothing tab responsible for the issue.
“Of course, this is not an easy feat, since clothing brands often sub-contract this type of work to other companies,” Smith admits. “However, we here at Fashun4ward believe that our customers deserve the best service, and if that means tracking down those poor girls lured into the fast fashion supply chain to prove that customer complaints are taken seriously, then, by golly, we’ll do just that! Plus, who doesn’t love constructive criticism?”
While many applaud the company’s customer service initiative, others are critical of Fashun4ward’s use of child labour in the first place.
“Well, you know what the young kids say: haters gon’ hate,” said Smith. “The fact is, these children love being in unusually cramped quarters with fellow friends. As for our cotton pickers in Uzbekistan, they have the great outdoors as an office — how great is that?!”
Nonetheless, Smith assures the haters that, in addition to the negative reviews, the sweatshop child workers will also hear of the positive ones.
“We will be offering the children chocolate bars as a reward. This is a tremendous gift for them, since they can barely afford these treats, and the fact that the cocoa may have been harvested by child labour symbolically connects them to the child workers around the globe — and that is, quite frankly, kinda beautiful.”
Now that’s what we call a customer service win!