A Clothing Brand’s Email Claimed to Be From a Neighbor Watching Recipients in Their Underwear. Some Customers Aren’t Happy.

Sophie Deluna was checking her email Saturday when, she said, a subject line caught her eye: “A message from your neighbor.” 

“Hi Sophie, it’s your neighbor right across the street with the silver car and little dog,” the email began. “Anyway, just wanted to let you know everyone in the neighborhood can see when you walk around your house in your underwear all day.”

Deluna, who lives in Bainbridge Island, Wash., said she immediately pictured a male neighbor who really does live across the street.

“I also remembered how many times I have walked by the window in my underwear,” she said. “I just thought, ‘OK, very inappropriate’—and also, ‘How did he get my email address?’….You just kind of get a shiver. I just stopped in my tracks.” 

It was near the bottom of the email, where it mentions a sales promotion, that Deluna said she realized the message wasn’t actually from a neighbor. It was from a direct-to-consumer athleisure brand called Feat, from which she said she had bought a matching shorts and sweatshirt set years ago. The email sender is listed as “Feat Clothing.”

“If you want some comfy shorts to walk around in, Feat is doing a limited time promo where you can get free shorts with any purchase,” the email suggests, with a hyperlink on the company name and another on the call to action, “click here to redeem.”

The message concludes with a postscript about trash pickup. “Don’t forget its [sic] trash day tomorrow! Cans must be out by 7am and back inside by 7pm!”

Feat’s chief executive, Taylor Offer, declined to say how many people the company had sent the “neighbor” email to.

“While a majority of our customers (men and women) responded positively to this email, there was a small subset of customers for whom the email triggered fear, anxiety and discomfort,” Offer said in a statement. “This was never our intention and the opposite of what we aspire to do as a brand.”

Though some people expressed discomfort with the email on various social-media platforms, one user on X, formerly Twitter, called it a “catchy email.” 

Offer said he had spoken on the phone with people affected by the email to understand what had caused their discomfort and “how we can do better to prevent things like this in the future.” 

He also responded from his personal account on Twitter to one complaint, saying that he was offering a gift card to “everyone hurt by this” and encouraging them to send him a direct message. 

In addition to shorts, Feat sells products such as hoodies, joggers and matching sets to men and women. 

Elyse Dehlbom, a Denver-based true-crime podcast host, also received Feat’s “neighbor” email over the weekend. She had previously helped promote Feat on Instagram, but still didn’t immediately realize that the email was a marketing message from the company. On top of that, her trash pickup was indeed the day following the day on which she read the email, sending her head spinning as she read it, she said.

“It’s not that it’s just insensitive,” Dehlbom said. Even if the brand didn’t intend it that way, she said with stalking and harassment as prevalent as it is, it felt as though the marketing tactic is “preying on people’s very real fears and fears people have for a very good reason. And then to have people who listen to my podcast where I’ve shared my experience with an abusive partner—we just did a series on intimate partner abuse and talked about stalking and harassment—so people that have listened to the podcast are then sending you messages of, ‘How could you support this brand?’ and that’s why I decided to say something.”

In an Instagram story, Dehlbom apologized to followers who had received the email because they’d purchased from the brand due to her reviews or links. 

She also said she alerted the company to her concerns and was offered a $50 gift card, which she didn’t feel was an appropriate response.

Dehlbom said that while she knows people and companies make mistakes and that they will learn from this experience, she wouldn’t feel comfortable continuing to promote the line on her social media “knowing that their poor choice in marketing has impacted people that put their trust in my recommendations.” 

Vancouver, British Columbia-based marketing executive Jessica Langer, who said she bought a sweatshirt from Feat several years ago, said she, too, received the email. 

“Even after I saw that it was a marketing email, I was astonished at how irresponsible it was,” she wrote in an email.

Offer, the Feat CEO, declined to talk about the process behind the email campaign or how it was reviewed before dissemination. 

Internal marketing departments and external vendors that offer email marketing services strive to come up with subject lines and copy that will lead consumers to actually open their messages and consider a purchase.

“You want to stand out, which is hugely important, because there’s so much noise for consumers. And that is 10-fold when we look at email marketing,” said Anjali S. Bal, an associate professor of marketing at Babson College. And once they stand out, companies need to have something worthwhile to say to consumers, she said. 

Some methods of getting attention are counterproductive, said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“When people feel tricked or deceived, especially in a somewhat negative way, they aren’t open to the brand message that follows,” Calkins said.

Once a company has upset consumers, it needs to make sure it responds to their concerns, he added.

Consumers “want to feel that they’ve been heard,” Calkins said. “And if they don’t feel that way, they can almost create more and more posts [on social media] and it can turn into a real problem for a brand.”  

In his statement, Offer said the brand is talking about how it can use its platform “in a positive way, whether to raise awareness or funds to support education and victims.”

As brands do more to stick out from the crowd, Calkins said they would need to find ways to be helpful or timely without alienating consumers. 

“I think we will see brands work very hard to take advantage of all the information they have to reach consumers at the right time with the right message,” he said. “But I think we will see brands struggle to figure out how best to do that in a way that doesn’t create backlash.”

Write to Megan Graham at [email protected]