Two reasons why:
1. They pay some link exchange site to spam my comments section with crap like this:
2. They steal my photos and use them without attribution:
I have recommended their holsters in the past:
I will do so no longer and will actively help quality manufacturers compete with DeSantis whenever possible. Were it not for the concealed carry boom in recent years, scumbags like DeSantis would have gone out of business long ago.
as a one time semi enthusiastic photographer I have to say theft of intellectual property and creative property pisses me off …I use to use a desantis with my G19 but now that I use a Sig P225 I need a new holster and it wont be desantis
That’s Busch league. As many good holster companies as there are, there’s no reason to support a bad one. Sorry De Santis, but you won’t be selling me anything.
I can’t believe they even removed your watermark. Do you keep any creative commons type on you blog/pictures?
It’ll be pretty easy for me to boycott them personally, but I’ll not be recommending them as decent inexpensive leather anymore. Intellectual property theft pisses me right off.
Man I just want to know what color nail polish you have on in that pic. That is awesome!
Seriously, it is pretty crappy to steal a photo like that. Removing your watermark means it was intentional by someone. Did you contact them and what was their reaction?
When I go in any gunshop, there is more DeSantis holsters in there discount bin than any other, except for maybe Fobus holsters. That tells me that most people don’t care too much for them right there.
I *just* deleted a spam comment from them off of my blog.
Sadly, this kind of business doesn’t get punished adequately in the market. So spread the word & let everyone know this isn’t acceptable.
Facebook has a ‘report intellectual property’ link under the options tab you will see below every picture. At least report it and get facebook to pull your photo from those scum bags! GOod luck, and cool photo!
File a DMCA takedown on them.
http://sarafhawkins.com/how-to-file-a-dmca-takedown-notice/
They may have just outsourced their marketing, not realizing that in doing so, they outsourced their reputation. Popehat has had a problem with that too: http://www.popehat.com/?s=outsource+your+marketing
I’m done with DeSantis, too shady for me.
Unfortunately, The spam link is not ours. There are spammers using my site to create artificial authority for themselves. My marketing team is trying to rectify this problem.
As for the use of the photo, we unfortunately got it from another blog that as well did not attribute it correctly. We have since pulled it down and I have instructed my marketing team to apologize and be more diligent in the future.
Which blog was that?
I’m looking forward to hearing from Andrew that your marketing team has indeed apologized to his satisfaction.
So you are only half done.
DeSantis said: “As for the use of the photo, we unfortunately got it from another blog…”
So you took it from someplace else, and didn’t give them credit when you posted it either. Is that your standard procedure?
I’ll try to find out from my marketing team Mr. Tuohy but he said he did an additional google search when I brought this post to his attention and he said that this site (http://girlsguidetoguns.com/) had it listed without credit to you.
They appear to have taken the photo from Instagram, where Natalie posted it a short time ago and did indeed give me credit for the image. In any case, she was the shooter in the photo and had my permission to use the image as she saw fit. Your company did not. And looking at the other photos posted on Facebook, it seems that stealing photos from random websites and not paying for their use or at least giving proper attribution is par for the course for your “team.”
Quite often, Facebook page maintenance is outsourced by companies to others. It is very likely that the person who did this would be fired once the company owners find out what he did in their name. My suggestion would be to contact the company’s marketing director and ask if they endorsed this action. If they had not, a licensing fee and a “sum of apology” would be appropriate, along with the removal of the idiot responsible from his position. If they had, then all your comments stand.
I’ve had similar things happen and almost always they turned into lucrative work opportunities int he end.
^^^ This ^^^
There’s probably not the time/budget expertise at DeSantis to put one person full-time on social media, so they contract out for X number of hours of social media work per month, and the contractor they chose decided to cut a few corners.
Whoops.
DeSantis now has their #$!% in the fire and needs to pull it out, fast. You can learn a lot about what a company (coughcoughGunsAmericacoughcough) thinks about their customers by how they react to a social media faux pas.
Our community lives online, primarily through our bloggers and our forums. Those bloggers live and breathe based on page views and attribution – either for advertising revenue or to simply justify the immense personal effort it takes to do this day in and day out. Using forum and blogger material without attribution chokes the air from our bloggers and that means it suffocates the entire community. You steal from one of us, and you steal from all of us.
Accidents would not happen if you shared that point of view. Instead of using our blogs to source marketing on the cheap, you could have contacted the bloggers and openly asked for their help. Yeah, it might have cost you a couple of bucks to use their stuff, but it all goes to the community in some small way.
Whatever “diligence” you instruct your marketing team to use, you cannot be a member of this community unless you get this into your head. If you want to live outside our community, I think you will find us more than happy to accommodate your desire. Good luck selling ‘Gun Control Holsters’.
Obviously this was meant as a reply to the DeSantis post…
Wow, thats why i love Milt Sparks
Send them an invoice… Seriously. Maximum rates.