Very Sorry Island Rose!

Posted on November 20th, 2009. Written by Rico.

Here, I apologize for doubting the intentions behind Island Rose’s email drive to get contributions for Typhoon Ondoy.

Yesterday Dustin Andaya left a comment on my original article, where I characterized Island Rose’s promise to donate P100 to Ondoy victims as “maybe bad”, wondering why the company had to the “base the donation on the amount of business they enjoy”. The comment of Andaya is below, full of clarifications:

Hello Rico,

My name is Dustin Andaya and I own Island Rose. I read your blog entry and I could not help but write back. I would be pretending if I said did not feel bad about your article.

When the storm happened, I called up my brother (who is also my partner) and asked him if I could do something to help the victims. We are not a large corporation but I thought that there must be something we can do since we were lucky enough to get through the storm.

As you can imagine, sales where tough during the storm but I thought that if I give a fixed part of our net income, I can help without going out of business. So we did it, for every dozen that was ordered, i set aside 100 bucks for the cause. We have a really good membership base so I announced it to my members through the newsletter you posted in your entry.

We were able to raise over P50,000 for the red cross and I look forward to seeing it used for a good cause. I will tell you straight up that giving away almost 10% of your gross income for some of the worst performing days of the year is suicidal for any business but we did it anyway. I heard that a local supermarket was commended for donating P10 for every P500 peso sale. In proportion, we gave almost 5 times that ratio. It was a bad week for the country and a bad week for us in terms of sales – the only thing we felt good about was knowing we could afford to make a donation at a time when people needed it.

Because it came straight from our income, It did not cost our customers a cent more to donate but we named the donation after our valued customers who ordered from us even in our toughest days. If you care to look, here is my blog entry about the fund drive:

http://islandrose.net/blog/2009/10/27/typhoon-ondoy-fund-drive/

Wouldn’t it have been great if everyone could give part of their income to the victims? We could have solved a lot of problems quickly.

We at Island Rose are very happy that we were blessed with the ability to help.

Sincerely,

Dustin

Here’s what I emailed Dustin:

Hi Dustin,

I would like to say sorry for the article written last October. In retrospect, calling Island Rose’s effort “Maybe Bad”—implying that you and your company might have used Typhoon Ondoy to profit—was a very insensitive thing to do, especially since I did not approach you or a company rep for clarification. I can only hope that publishing your reply and my apology will make up for this, by showing that your intentions were truly genuine.

Regards,
Rico M.