Brand Swag (Failure): Bath & Body Works and KKK
Brand Swag: Bath & Body Works
Objective: Bath & Body Works recently found itself in hot water over its 'Snowed-In' candle design, which unintentionally evoked a dark chapter of American history. The candle’s snowflake cutouts bore an unsettling resemblance to the infamous hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist terrorist group—a connection that quickly caught the attention of sharp-eyed consumers.
Why it didn’t work:
1. Pareidolia; a psychological tendency where people perceive familiar patterns, such as faces, in random or unrelated objects—like seeing a face in the clouds, a smiley in a coffee stain, or eyes on the front of a car. In this case, it was a candle label.
In response to the public reaction, Bath & Body Works swiftly removed the candle from store shelves and issued a public apology. The company expressed regret for any offense caused, emphasizing that the resemblance was purely unintentional. “We are committed to listening to our teams and customers and committed to fixing any mistakes we make—even those that are unintentional like this one,” the company stated.
