Sephora, LVMH Sued For Racial Discrimination Against Asian Customers

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. Read More »