Has RipCurl done a 360?

The internationally popular surfing apparel company from Australia has just pulled its ad for a male surfer competing as a transgender woman named Sasha Lowerson from Instagram.

According to the Daily Mail:

Australians are calling for a national boycott of iconic surf brand Rip Curl for using a transgender woman in their social media accounts, as the brand moves to scrub any trace of the promotion.

Rip Curl came under fire for using Western Australian professional longboarder and transgender woman Sasha Lowerson in a promotion for women's surfing last week.

Lowerson, 44, featured on the Rip Curl Women Instagram page on Thursday as part of the company's Meet The Local Heroes of Western Australia campaign.

It comes just months after Rip Curl severed ties with pro-surfer and shark attack survivor Bethany Hamilton - one of the world's most famous surfers - reportedly over her opposition to transgender people competing in women's sport.

The post featuring Lowerson has since been deleted from the Rip Curl Women Instagram page, but hundreds of Australians kept attacking the company on other posts across its social media platforms. 

Obviously, they hadn't been listening to their customers.

According to Sky News Australia:

Thanks to the actions of Rip Curl over the past five days, the once iconic Australian surf brand is living proof that women are finally fighting back against companies using transgender women to promote products for women and girls. 

It wasn't a picture made in heaven for the company, given that in order to feature Lowerson, they dumped popular women's surfing champion Bethany Hamilton, who had refused to compete with transgender surfers because she believes such competitions are fundamentally unfair. I wrote about that here.

The response was apparently so bad, and from so many places, that, well, the ad is gone now.

#RIPRipCurl had been trending on Twitter. The Daily Mail reported that the angry scoring from previous fans continued.

What's amazing here is that not only do this company's executives not know who their customers are -- neither in Malibu, where angry surfers were reported on Twitter, nor in Australia where fans don't seem to forget an error, nor in Hawaii, where Bethany Hamilton and her fierce supporters live -- and what their attitudes are, they seemed to have missed the lesson of Bud Light, which collapsed as a top beer brand when it presented a man posing as a flippant woman as its standard-bearer. It also presented an executive who clearly had contempt for Bud Light's customers.

Bud Light has yet to recover from that marketing disaster, yet here Rip Curl goes, right off the Bud Light cliff. 

Well, they can break a good brand that way, and the surfing community has many options to choose from for its board shorts and other sartorial decisions, not just Quiksilver and Billabong, but many smaller local brands, which are prized.

They may have caught themselves in time, but some damage is done, not just in their marketing decision but because everyone now knows that they are stupid.

 Image: Wikipedia // public domain