Hi there, to all of our faithful customers, you may be interested in this rather unkind email that someone searching our website wrote. I’ve written a reply to her which you can read below.
She wrote :- Why do you list all of your underwear so negatively? "Chub Rub", "Gigantic" and so on, It really sounds like you are laughing at your customers size. I was going to order for an elderly relative, but not from you now, it really feels like you are ridiculing the people you are trying to sell to.
Here's my reply, I hope you all agree with me and approve:-
Hello
I'm afraid I can't agree less with your comments. As far as the term 'chub rub' is concerned it is a well known and media accepted term mostly used by teenagers and young women/mothers. They use the term chub-rub for what would otherwise be termed chafing thighs because their chubbiness causes their thighs to rub together making them red and sore and very uncomfortable. Chub rub is a much friendlier term than 'chafing thighs' and not an unkind one either, in fact, chub comes from chubby and describes someone who is just a little bit plump.
Gigantic, huge, fat, - yes, not nice words to use. However, we are in the business of attracting bariatric women and also their carers, daughters, sons, husbands, sisters, other relatives, neighbours and indeed, whoever else is trying to find knickers, panties, undies, tights, knee-highs, nighties, underskirts, bras for them to wear. Sometimes, the person requiring the garments is elderly and not computer literate and/or not very mobile and so other people are doing the searching for them and quite often these searchers find themselves wasting huge amounts of time and getting stressed and resentful with the task. Usually, they (the searchers) are not aware of the term 'bariatric' to describe a very overweight person ..... instead, quite often, angst ridden or temper driven with frustration, they will key in 'knickers for woman with huge bum' or 'tights for gigantic thighs' and they do that because, if they put in a polite, sedate search term such as 'knickers/tights for plus size lady' all of the major stores such as M&S fill their screen, promising exactly the items that the searcher is looking for. Then the searcher spends hours crawling these websites, only to find that M&S and other such large organisations DO NOT manufacture or supply knickers and tights for bariatic/huge/gigantic/massive people. So, then the searcher gets understandable annoyed and out of sheer desperation they type in such search terms as gigantic and huge and fat...... and THEN they find The Big Bloomers Company...... they are not laughing any more than we are laughing.... they are just victims of the fact that superstores have a huge marketing budget and can outbid the The Big Bloomers Company on sedate and seemly ‘search terms’ such as ‘plus size panties’ or ‘large tights’ and so we never appear on the first page for such ‘under-stated, diffident’ search terms, although in truth, we are the only company who have what the searcher is looking for. So, you see, through no fault of ours or theirs, the searcher can’t find us with polite searches because we can't possibly afford to place our adverts at the top of the first page along with M&S and other superstores - we are just as much a victim of this system as the searcher.
I'm really glad that you wrote though, because I'll post this on the blogs and on our websites and on eBay because it is quite obvious that if you have thought us to be rude and lacking in respect and laughing at our customers, then other people may also have harboured such untrue and unkind thoughts about us.
Sorry the elderly relative that you are trying to help is going to be denied the benefit of our nice, big, comfortable products.
Dianne Mannering, co founder with Laura Murray of The Big Bloomers Company