Nike has this service where you can go to an
online order form to
customize your
sneakers by having something (your
name,
personal mantra, whatever) sewn onto the sneakers. So, this guy named Jonah Peretti, who's a grad student at
MIT, ordered a pair of sneakers with the word "
sweatshop." Nike iD, however,
canceled his order. The gem to come out of all this is the published (online)
email correspondence between Nike iD and Peretti. You can read it at http://shey.net/niked.html and giggle gleefully at how Nike
squirms in an
increasingly awkward situation. I love the
irony of Nike
inviting people who have money to pay to "build their own shoes" so that people in poor countries
far away can then go build their shoes for them.
Nike has since added the words Sweatshop, Sweat, Shop, Child Labor, ChildLabor, Exploit, and Swetshop to its automatic filters which are supposedly in place to reject profanity and "gang terms."