an apology

Dear friends,

Over the weekend I came across this quote and it seemed very timely.

Last week Todd wrote a post as part of his series on our customer survey. Many of you have really enjoyed this series and, like the other posts in the series, it received a lot of comments. However, the tone of the post was not what he intended, and those words caused hurt for some of you. Had I read the post before it was published, I would have asked him to change it. For that I am deeply sorry.

If you know either of us personally, you know that we care deeply about the people around us, both on a personal level and as a small business. Many of you have become good friends over the years. Those of you who know us know that we would never want to hurt anyone, but we ended up doing that. For that we’re extremely sorry, and we sincerely apologize for the hurt feelings that we caused with that post.

We had considered taking down the post, and we asked several people for their opinions on doing this. In the end, we decided to leave it up for two reasons. First, because so many of you put time into writing responses to it, and we don’t want to see your efforts disappear. And, second, as a reminder to ourselves in the future that we need to be more careful of peoples’ feelings. We’re not proud of how that post came across. But we think that leaving it out in the open, as a little scar on our reputation, will remind us to be more sensitive in the future.

Before anything else, our business aims to build community, to be inclusive, to provide uplifting experiences and inspiration, and to operate in a moral and ethical manner. We value our friends and our customers, and we want to contribute to this community in positive ways. Please forgive us.