Ex-executive Robert Spetner of Huntington Beach (right) remembers his last job like a bad bikini wax.
Spetner, former president of a company that sells Nad’s hair removal products, claims in a lawsuit that he was fired in June for blowing the whistle on more than 300,000 boxes of defective body strips. Spetner’s suit said the wax-coated strips, which were supposed to yank hair from unwanted areas, just didn’t work.
Nevertheless, Sue Ismiel and Daughters — an Australian company with U.S. headquarters in Garden Grove — delivered the defective Nad’s strips to national retailers, including Walmart, Target, CVS, Safeway and others, according to the suit, filed last week in Orange County Superior Court.
“They didn’t want any retailers to know about it, and we’re talking big retailers, just about everyone who sells beauty products,” Spetner said in an interview. “I kept raising the issue, what are we going to do about it? We need to face the fire.”
At the same time, the suit said, the company sought reimbursement from its manufacturer in Spain for the defective strips, made in 2009 and 2010.
Spetner, who pushed for a wholesale recall of the product, now is seeking $500,000 in damages.
“The only reason they didn’t renew his contract was because he was a whistleblower,” said his attorney, Russ Thomas, of Newport Beach. “There’s still some (defective product) on the shelves, it takes time to dissipate that stock.”
Spetner said he wrote a letter to the federal Food and Drug Administration and reported the product to the state Attorney General’s office, but did not hear back from the agencies.
Attorneys for Sue Ismiel and Daughters Inc. said the defect caused no real physical danger and that most of the product was quarantined and did not make its way onto shelves as Spetner alleged.
Eric Schneider, the firm’s attorney, said complaints were handled individually. Schneider explained a full recall would have been impractical and that the problem has since been fixed.
“Mr. Spetner is opportunistic and greatly magnified what had been a minor problem,” Schneider said. “It’s a little like buying defective detergent that doesn’t clean clothes.”
Schneider said Spetner was not fired for being a whistleblower, but for being insubordinate and for poor sales performance. The attorney also accused Spetner of double-dipping on vacation pay, to the tune of $27,000.
Executive fired in fight over bad bikini wax strips is a post from: In Your Face
