On Thursday morning the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Kohl’s contacted METAvivor President Kelly Lange to open a dialog about our conflicting awareness campaigns. We are grateful to all our supporters for bringing our concerns to Kohl’s attention. And we are grateful to Kohl’s for hearing our voices and entering into dialogue with us. We hope a mutually agreeable arrangement can be decided upon very quickly. We will keep everyone informed. In the meantime we ask everyone to use your social media outlets to express why metastatic disease is the real elephant in the pink room of breast cancer.
As of 9 PM EST METAvivor has received no contact from Kohl’s, other than an automatically generated acknowledgement that our emailed letter was received by customer service. Direct emails to Kohl’s executive staff remain unanswered.
On Friday, February 21 a staff member at Kohl's told us to expect a call from the President of Kohl's by the end of the day. As of Monday evening, February 24 we have not heard from Mr. Mansell, or from anyone else at Kohl's or Komen. Read the letter we sent to Kohl's and Komen this evening.
On Friday Directory of Advocacy and former President Dian “CJ” Corneliussen-James contacted Kohl’s headquarters and reached the office of the President. After explaining the situation to a helpful employee who was unaware of METAvivor and our campaign, CJ was promised that the President of Kohl’s would call her on Friday. As of this posting on Saturday morning, we have not received a call from Kohl’s.
METAvivor has decided not to comment further on the similarities of the campaigns as an organization to give Kohl’s a chance to respond. We greatly appreciate everyone’s support for our 2012 Elephant in The Pink Room campaign. We encourage everyone to continue to tweet and post about this on our behalf while we explore our options. We welcome your comments on this blog post and our Facebook page.
Atlantic Region Ambassador Marlene King was born in Jamaica, West Indies and moved to Washington, DC with her family at the age of 13. She has been married to Eric for twenty-eight years and has three sons Eric, II, Bryant and Aston, a granddaughter Taylor and grandson Xavier. She currently resides in Northwest Baltimore. Despite no family history of heart disease or breast cancer; at the age of 39 she suffered a heart attack and at the age of 49 (in April 2008), she was given a Stage 0 (DCIS) breast cancer diagnosis. After years of keeping the cancer at bay, in July 2012 Marlene was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.
