Sports brand Puma – purposefully or not – has found itself dragged into Hong Kong’s political issues after releasing a photo of marathon jersey adorned with a rather controversial sequence of numbers and letters.
While some runners and spectators at yesterday’s Standard Chartered Marathon carried yellow umbrellas and wore “I want real universal suffrage” on their gear, Puma’s crime was posting a photo to its Facebook page of a t-shirt with the entry number D7689 pinned to it.
If you’re not sure why the hell that’s a big deal, let us break it down for you:
– 689 is a dig at Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung who got exactly that number of votes from the 1,200-member selection committee when he was elected to office in 2012.
– And, apparently, D7 means the f-word (naughty!) in Cantonese… or something along those lines.
EJ Insight reports that the global chief executive of Puma received a strongly worded email from a pro-establishment supporter who took issue with the image.
The brand has since removed the photo from its Facebook page but has not commented on the incident.
It’s a shame it’s been pulled really as there was also an actual cat in the picture. We like cats.
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