I’ve just found out that a person named @wokenproletariat stole the concept and original design of my White Tears and White Feminist Tears candles barely three months after I launched (November 2015), and is continuing to churn that stolen work out for profit. When first alerted to this via txt I first figured it was someone who was employing the same general concept as my own, white tears in a candle, which wasn’t much of a big deal to me. But after landing myself on their Etsy I found that this person wasn’t just selling similar candles, they had actually went to the lengths of copying every single aspect of my product design down to the colors, font, and tear design, minus my brand name placement (Zeyna Iman, now Shop Zeyna). They even went as far as mimicking my photography styling by producing a photo exactly like the one I had featured on Buzzfeed in December 2015. I’m appalled at their audacity to not just steal my work in its entirety but to be so bold to also create a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook page dedicated to this stolen work. I even saw that they are currently reaching out to platforms like Kinfolk Kollective to pursue advertising for their thievery, which is truly some next level scam shit I have no choice but to interpret as a personal attack.
The fact that of the maybe 10 blogs that Woken Proletariat is following on Tumblr, that @racialicious, @poc-creators, and @blackownedbusiness are among them, is absurd to me. These are blogs I know to be safe spaces that value the original work of black creatives, and it’s disgusting to see that WP has hella selectively curated this list of folk to simultaneously pilfer content from and potentially attempt to exploit for promotion. Especially since despite WP’s “anti-black tears candle” and gratuitous posts affirming that black girls are magic, black lives matter, and “just because us black folk are magic doesn’t mean we’re not real,” I’m inclined to believe at this point that WP isn’t even black. It’s nothing short of audacious for WP to wax on about “anti-black misogyny” while their whole platform is based off the stolen work of a black woman. That’s past hypocrisy, that’s grossly depraved. And again, personal.
Black women’s art and labor is not a free for all, even if there is a precedent for abuse that allows folk to think our work is available for the taking while boxing us out of profits. I’m not anyone’s mule, try as the world might to make me so. My work is my own and the wild hours I’ve spent on Adobe Illustrator or sweating in kitchens stirring pots of wax weren’t so someone could run up and steal everything I’d created for their own profit. Shop Zeyna and all the products I’ve built to populate it is how I sustain myself, and its so enraging and saddening to see that while I’ve been struggling to make ends meet (having just spent the past month sleeping on a couch in Brooklyn), someone out there decided to jack my entire product down to its aesthetic and then sell it at a cheaper price. A price which I have to wonder has even allowed them to benefit from their theft in the first place. It’s very obvious that WP deliberately imitated my design in its entirety in order to confuse customers seeking out the original candles (as they were featured in publications like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post), which is grossly calculated.
I’m asking for you all’s help in getting this thief out the paint; there’s only so much I can do in following up with Etsy because as I’ve said, this person has gone to great lengths to infringe on the bit of social capital I’ve achieved for my brand, having promoted their identical knockoff on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I’m just glad that when I transitioned off Etsy to build my own site, I redesigned my candles to their current form. If you could help me with reporting their social media as spam/abuse (which it is) or commenting on their pages to let them know they have no business trying to school about misogynoir while profiting off the stolen work of a black woman, I’d greatly appreciate it. This has been stressing me out to the point of sickness and I truly need all the help I can get.
The fraud’s info: https://www.facebook.com/wokenproletariat/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/wokenproletariat https://twitter.com/wokenproletaria/ https://www.instagram.com/wokenproletariat/
Where you can find me and my shop: www.shopzeyna.com/shop-all
www.instagram.com/shopzeyna www.twitter.com/djennneba www.facebook.com/shopzeyna www.instagram.com/djennneba thank you <3
