Chinese Online Shopping Sites Ditch Dolce & Gabbana In The Ad Backlash | Top news

By Pei Li and Cate Cadell

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese e-commerce sites have removed Dolce & Gabbana products in the context of a violent reaction to a racist and celebrity advertising campaign by celebrities and social media.

The ads – released earlier this week to spark interest in a Shanghai fashion show that the Italian brand had subsequently canceled – featured a Chinese woman struggling to eat spaghetti and pizzas with chopsticks, sparking a stir. consumer criticism.

The blunder was compounded by the online broadcast of screenshots of a private conversation on Instagram, in which the brand's designer, Stefano Gabbana, was referring to "China's Ignorant Dirty Smelling Smelling Mafia" and used the smiling emoji poo to describe the country. The brand said that Gabbana's account had been hacked.

In the midst of calls for a boycott, concern was threatening to become a serious setback for one of Italy's best-known fashion brands in a crucial market, where Louis' rivals LVMH's Vuitton at Kering's Gucci are trying to expand.

Chinese customers account for more than one-third of spending on luxury goods around the world and buy more and more from their domestic market rather than traveling abroad.

The Chinese company Kaola, an e-commerce platform owned by the Chinese company NetEase Inc., confirmed that it had removed Dolce & Gabbana products, while the luxury goods retailer Secoo had deleted the lists from the mark Wednesday night.

On Yoox Net-A-Porter, owned by parent company Richemont and a major high-end online retailer, the brand's products were no longer available on its platforms in China. The company declined to comment.

The checks conducted by Reuters on Thursday morning also showed pages previously related to Dolce & Gabbana items on the e-commerce sites hosted by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and JD.com Inc. and were no longer available, and the search for the mark did not succeed.

Alibaba and JD.com did not respond to requests for comment and Dolce & Gabbana did not comment on the relocations of retailers.

After his faux pas in China quickly spread to the Chinese platform Weibo, similar to Twitter, he apologized in a statement published on the site.

The movie star "Memoirs of a Geisha", Zhang Ziyi, criticized the brand, while singer Wang Junkai said that he had ended an agreement to become a brand ambassador.

A store in Haikou City, southern China, announced to Weibo that all Dolce & Gabbana products had been removed from its shelves.

The Youth League of the Communist Party, the youth wing of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, told Weibo, "We invite foreign companies to invest and grow in China … companies working in this country must respect China and its people ".

The blunder is not the first of Dolce & Gabbana in China, even as it seeks to increase its appeal there. Last year, social media criticized social media for another series of ads showing the dirty side of Chinese life.

The unlisted company does not publish results and does not disclose the amount of its income from China.

Other rumors have followed in China without seeming to cause lasting damage, especially at brands like Kering's Balenciaga, which apologized in April after a violent reaction to the treatment of some Chinese customers in Paris.

But there was an increased likelihood that such controversies could affect sales as buyers became more brand-sensitive, some analysts said.

"The market is different, Chinese customers are more savvy and the choice is much bigger," said Sindy Liu, London-based luxury marketing consultant.

"Many Western brands do not really understand China as well in terms of cultural sensitivities, but most brands are very careful, they do not do things that are humorous."

Controversial comments from designers can be devastating for luxury brands. Christian Dior, which is now part of LVMH, was sacked by designer John Galliano in 2011, after one of the worst consequences of the fashion world. He was filmed after filming anti-Semitic abuse against people in a bar in Paris.

(Report by Pei Li and Cate Cadell in Beijing, additional report by Sarah White in Paris and Claudia Cristoferi in Milan, edited by Himani Sarkar)

Copyright 2018 Thomson Reuters.