I haven’t been a journalist for what feels like an eternity (read: two years). When I chose to come to IFA here in Berlin, I didn’t expect much, either – the show was thinly attended by the international press and mostly caters to local European media. But Honor, a Chinese smartphone company that has been around long enough to know better, delivered a catastrophically tone-deaf keynote at the show I feel compelled to discuss.

Imagine, if you will, a smartphone for the ladies. In and of itself, this concept isn’t new — especially for a Chinese electronics company. But in 2023, the level of global awareness around the issues of gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusivity is at an all-time high. At the very least, if such values aren’t in alignment with your brand story or domestic culture, they are topics to be avoided. And that’s not hard to do. It takes a real choice to make a smartphone that specifically implicates gender as a point of discussion. And yet.

Meet the Honor Purse (~concept~). The phone itself really isn’t relevant — it’s a rehashed Huawei folding design repurposed to loosely emulate the aesthetic of a clutch. You can attach a shoulder strap or chain to it and customize the outer display wallpaper to complete the digital fashion illusion. Such a product is not inherently offensive, but it plainly courts the opportunity to offend. You aren’t technically doing anything wrong by bringing a Nerf gun into a library, but also: everyone can see where this is going. It did not take long for it to be very clear where Honor was going.

The company’s CEO — a man, of course — was presenting the product. He’s a lousy enough public speaker to warrant an emcee in his own right, but when you combine that with the fact that he was on a stage telling women what women want in a product, the train had already pulled into Problematic Ave. Cultural differences aside, a mere “Is there anything we should think about here?” email to anyone with two brain cells and basic global awareness should have yielded a discussion about the optics of this decision. It is one of the single easiest mistakes not to make, so easy that, when it does happen, it feels like an active decision to offend. And while I don’t believe Honor intended to offend anyone, I do believe anyone involved in this decision had considered the possibility it would do just that. And is that any better?

Anyway, I don’t want to beat this over the head for 1500 words — it’s hardly deserving — but the moment two very-beauty-standard-normative models strutted out on the stage to “demonstrate” the product while Honor’s CEO stood between them, raising his arms in a “Right? RIIIIIGHT?” fashion, I felt I’d like been transported back to 2013 in all the wrong ways. Companies know better than this — or at very least they should.

(In all seriousness: I don’t want to speak “for” women about what is or isn’t offensive to women. I am not a woman. But I think it’s entirely fair to say this was in very, very poor taste.)