~ American Apparel Apologizes After Mistakenly Posting Challenger Photo as Being “Cool”

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The millennial kid working on social media for this brand thought that the debris and clouds created by the 1980s Challenger expolsion, in which several American astronauts died, looked “cool.”

American Apparel Posts Challenger Explosion As Fireworks for Fourth of July, Later Apologizes

    July 2014
    This is probably one of the worst social media slip-ups a company could make. Especially on the Fourth of July. On Thursday,
    American Apparel posted a photo of the Challenger explosion , apparently thinking it showed fireworks. (The photo looks nothing like fireworks.) They later apologized for the offensive slip-up. As a reminder, the Challenger disaster, in which an American space shuttle exploded just after take-off in 1986, tragically killed 7 astronauts.
    The company reblogged the post on its Tumblr on Thursday , apparently without realizing what it showed, according to a Tweet from Buzzfeed’s Adam Davis. American Apparel tagged the post “smoke, clouds.” The company later removed the post and apologized on Twitter.
    …Welp, that’s incredibly awkward, especially for a company that touts America in its name and boasts that all of its clothing is made in the USA. It’s also a weird excuse for what happened. Regardless of whether or not the social media employee was born before or after the disaster (we suspect many social media editors were born post-Challenger), the photo’s origin probably should’ve been investigated before being posted, right?
    …. The modified photo’s original uploader, a Tumblr user and UK artist going by the name of truangles, apparently was well-aware of what the photo showed when he modified and posted it. But he immediately realized what a gaffe the company made. “They don’t even know what it is,” he commented. “Who even runs their blog?”

American Apparel Apologizes After Mistakenly Posting Challenger Photo

    Jul 4, 2014, 4:01 PM ET
    By GILLIAN MOHNEY
    American Apparel apologized this week after a social media employee mistook a photo of the shuttle Challenger disaster for clouds and posted the photo on the company’s Tumblr site.
    In re-posted images of the original post the explosion can be seen on a red background tagged as “smoke” and “clouds.”
    The company quickly deleted the post and tweeted a statement apologizing for using the image.

The Worst Social Media Brand Blunders of 2014

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