Cupshe got caught saying it would not collab with Black people, and the receipts came straight from the brand’s own inbox.
On June 4, Niasia Boykin, the founder and chief executive of the Philadelphia based influencer agency The Brownstone Collective, pitched a roster of her creators to the swimwear label Cupshe for an upcoming campaign. The reply she says she received did not bother to hide behind code words. A representative named Sophie, writing from the company’s Influencer Relations team, told her the brand “would not collab with Black people this campaign.” Boykin posted the screenshot to Threads and called it exactly what it is. Racial discrimination, and an illegal basis to turn down a business pitch.
When the post took off and people started questioning whether it could be real, Boykin held her ground. She said she had to read it three times herself to be sure her eyes were not playing tricks, and she pointed out that the message came from a verified cupshe.com company domain, not some spoof account. That detail matters, because it moves the story off the easy ledge of anyone being able to fake an email and onto the harder question of how a line like that ends up in a brand’s official outbound mail in the first place.
Cupshe’s answer to that question tells you almost everything about how these companies actually operate. A few hours later, Boykin received a second email. The brand said it was shocked and devastated, apologized for any harm, insisted the message did not reflect its values or the way it partners with creators, and announced that the employee responsible was no longer with the company. The apology was unsigned. It came from a shared inbox. And as the boycott calls spread across Threads and beyond, the brand said nothing on any of its own public social channels.
So sit with the full shape of it. A fast fashion swimwear brand founded in Nanjing, China in 2015, with a US headquarters in Manhattan Beach, California, has spent years building its American business on influencer marketing, the exact economy that Black creators and Black consumers power at scale. When a Black talent manager walked through the front door with that audience in hand, somebody on the brand’s own team put the rejection in writing and tied it directly to race. Then, once it went public, the company’s entire accountability plan was to delete one person from the payroll and send a private apology with no name attached to it.
That is not accountability. That is damage control dressed up as conscience.
Here is the part the apology is built to make everyone forget. A decision to exclude an entire race from a marketing campaign is not the kind of thing a single rogue junior employee dreams up alone on a Tuesday afternoon. Campaign casting reflects direction. It reflects who the brand thinks its customer is, who it wants in the imagery, and who it quietly decides is not worth the spend. Maybe Sophie typed the sentence. The mindset that made the sentence sayable did not start and end at her desk. Firing the messenger lets the structure that produced the message walk away clean.
And the silence is its own statement. A brand that truly believed this was a one off betrayal of everything it stands for would say so loudly, publicly, with a name and a face behind it. Instead Cupshe handled it the way you handle a leak, not the way you handle a wrong. The message to Boykin was private. The fix was internal. The public got nothing. The bet is that the news cycle moves on, the swimsuit photos keep posting, and the summer sales land before anyone remembers what the company said when it thought no one outside that thread was watching.
Black spending power is not a courtesy these brands extend to us. It is a market they compete for, and one they lose the moment we decide to take it elsewhere. Boykin did the work of making the private public. What happens next decides whether telling her that her clients were the wrong color for the campaign costs Cupshe nothing, or costs it the very audience it assumed it could profit from without ever respecting.
