Sephora, LVMH Get Slammed With Lawsuit For Racial Discrimination Against Asian Customers

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Sephora has gotten itself into hot water after a 20 percent off sale in early November that crashed its site. Four women of Chinese descent have filed a class-action suit against the beauty retailer and LVMH, its parent company, for discriminating against minority customers. In this case, deactivating and blocking accounts of shoppers "of perceived Chinese/Asian descent based on the ill-founded and discriminatory belief that all Chinese/Asian customers abuse discount sales to engage in bulk purchase for re-sale."

According to Fashionista, the court filing states the Sephora site crashed Nov. 6, preventing any customers from accessing their accounts or making purchases, but later that evening the site was back up and running. As the retailer explained things on its Facebook site, the malfunctioning was due to "high levels of bulk buys for reselling purposes in North America and other countries" and a number of accounts it believed to be associated with that activity remained suspended.

According to the plaintiffs, the blocked accounts belonged to "email addresses with names that appeared to signify Chinese/Asian race/ethnicity/national origin/descent" or Web domains originating in China or Asia. Hence the suit, which the four women — Xiao Xiao, Man Xu, Jiali Chen and Tiantian Zou — filed in the Southern District of New York U.S. District Court Tuesday, Nov. 18.

Sephora sent a statement to Fashionista by a rep for the company:

"This lawsuit significantly distorts the facts in this matter. We look forward to defending our actions in court. Among other points, we intend to make very clear that clients from a number of countries around the world have been impacted by a temporary block we needed to place on accounts in order to restore the functionality of our site during a surge of activity by resellers during a promotional event two weeks ago."

Stay tuned for updates to come in the following weeks. Do you think Sephora is discriminating against its customers of Asian decent? Share your thoughts and comments below!

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Una foto pubblicata da Sephora (@sephora) in data: Nov 11, 2014 at 12:48 PST

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