And nor do I like lying to you.
Why am I declaring this?
Well because I recently ran a competition and reviewed some chocolates that were sent to me by a lady called Genevie who, according to her website, ran a family business hand making chocolates from her home in Scotland.
Tales of her son helping to taste them.
The love that went into them.
I highlighted the fact that there wasn’t an ingredients list but put this down to this just being a sample box and that surely the boxes sent out would have them. It didn’t occur to me about there being no “best before date”.
I was blinded by the fact it was chocolate, I was jet lagged, I am not as cynical as I should be maybe. For whatever reason, I took all of this at face value. They tasted okay so I told you all about them, gave you a link and invited you to enter a competition.
And then this appeared on a Facebook group for bloggers: A story of a review .
The chocolates are not hand made in Scotland. They are imported from Belgium.
I am not even sure that Genevie exists. There is no son tasting them at the kitchen table. There is no help from husband with the website as was all reported initially. The photos on the site are istock pics and only representative.
They have apologised on their site (I am not going to link to them as that boosts their Google rankings) but you can Google and find it, I am sure. And put this down to not being able to cope with demand.
They can’t cope with demand, yet say they haven’t sold any chocolates online.
How does that work?
This whole company is built on a lie. And that stinks quite frankly.
So I would like to apologise to all of you. I am not pulling the original review but I am putting an update on it and removing the link to their site.
And the moral of this story? As our mother’s told us, don’t accept chocolates from a stranger.
oh no, that’s rubbish. Sending hugs xxx
I read that also and feel used I haven’t received any as yet but linked up to be possibly chosen, I will be emailing to ask for my data to be withdrawn from the database x
If you want to review the chocolates then go for it, they are not bad chocolates. They are just not what they originally said. And being Belgian, they are just another box of chocolates and at roughly £1 each they are expensive for what they are.
BIG BIG PR fail! They must have been thinking that bloggers and their readers are all too kind-hearted to smell a rat at best or…erm…fool at worst! Glad to see they got found out!
PS: I signed up to receive your blog via email but somehow it doesn’t happen…is it me? Do you have me down in your ‘magic list’? (I checked spam and all that) 🙁
Thank you. It has made a lot of people very cross.
Will check the subscription. Are you on Virgin Media? Their filters sometimes stop.
I’ve founbd out how to get them on Virgin media. Adding the Mummy Barrow address to the webmail address list. Finding the messages in the spam folder and marking them as “not spam” doesn’t work. What you need to do is go to your Virgin medias wwebmail page and click on “settings” on the top right and select “filters” then “create a new filter” (at the bottom). Type in the Mummy Barrow email address and choose “create a filter with this search” and then select “Never send this to spam”. It takes a lot less time to do than to explain! T, you might want to keep this to tell other people how to sort it out.
Good for you for this, it’s made me so very cross. If the truth of the situation had been offered from the beginning then it wouldn’t have caused this chaos now.
Exactly.
They either had a product. Or they didnt.
I hope you will allow your readers to hear our side of the story:
Indeed I will. However this line is the one that makes me the most angry.
You go on to say that you haven’t actually sold any online yet. So do you and did you have a product that made you think “hmm yes, let’s set up a company” or did you not?
If you are the chocolatier that you claim to be then you would not have dumped the product you so loved, having set up a company, to import Belgian chocolates. How can demand now be an issue when all you have done is send out PR Samples?
None of this rings true. It is all a lie and a massive PR fail.