Francesca Biagioli A New Zealand mom ordered a $5 Temu T-shirt. Instead of leaving the back blank, the seller printed her polite note to the vendor. Funny—but also unsettling.
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In recent years, Chinese e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein have swept across the globe, seducing millions of customers with endless catalogs and prices that often sound too good to be true. The catch, as countless investigations have shown, is that those bargains sometimes come at the expense of quality—or even safety—with reports of toxic or substandard materials cropping up again and again.
And then there’s the question of service. How much real care goes into fulfilling those bargain-bin orders? A recent story from New Zealand suggests: not much. It’s the kind of mix-up that makes you laugh, then pause to think.
The t-shirt that no one expected
Courtney Couper, a New Zealand mother, ordered a custom T-shirt from Temu for her son. The price was just under $5 (£4 / 4.6€)—a deal so cheap it almost feels like stealing. She wanted something simple: her child’s name printed on the front, nothing at all on the back.
The system, however, refused to let her leave the back field blank. So Courtney wrote a polite note to the seller in English:
“Dear seller, I don’t want anything printed on the back. I would like the T-shirt to remain white. Thank you.”
You can guess what happened next. That exact message was printed across the back of the shirt.
Picture it: her son’s name proudly displayed on the chest, while the back reads like a customer service memo gone rogue. A masterpiece of nonsense, stitched in polyester.
Courtney says she was “in shock” at first, before bursting out laughing. In the end, she decided the shirt was unique enough to keep as a quirky piece for her son to wear around the house. Temu refunded her the full amount and offered an apology.
In a twist of irony, Courtney admitted she had almost predicted the blunder while typing the message: “Imagine if they actually printed this on the back.” A joke that became, quite literally, wearable reality.
Temu’s response
After receiving the botched T-shirt, Courtney contacted Temu’s customer service with photos of the mistake. The company replied swiftly, apologizing for the error and issuing a full refund. A spokesperson confirmed the order didn’t meet expectations, thanked her for her good humor, and reiterated Temu’s “money-back guarantee.”
Still, Courtney couldn’t resist adding a warning: beware when ordering personalized products online. Behind the screen, she suggested, there isn’t a human carefully reading your notes—just an algorithm copying and pasting.
The not-so-funny moral
The story is undeniably funny. But it also raises a serious question: if even a basic instruction like “leave the back blank” isn’t understood, how much can we really trust products sold at such rock-bottom prices?
When it’s just a T-shirt, the stakes are low and the laughs are high. But when the order involves cosmetics, children’s toys, or electrical accessories, the consequences could be much more serious. And that’s when the joke stops being funny.
