‘Most unprofessional email I’ve ever seen’: Woman declines company’s offer to buy her business, and they hit back with the rudest response

There are many ways to respond to a rejection, many of them less than elegant, but one business is highlighting exactly the wrong way to respond to a fellow business, no matter the circumstances.

In a video shared to TikTok by the owner of said fellow business, a truly gobsmacking line of events plays out. A small business owner, who largely posts on her professional page @etherealhandmade, the protagonist of our story has been working to keep a small jewelry business open through the pandemic and into her full adulthood.

She’s succeeded in that, through years of work, and now has a compact but profitable business under her belt. So, when a company reached out offering to pay her a measly £150,000 for something she’d poured years of effort into, she politely declined.

And what did the other business do in response? Act like a spoiled child, of course, and send back an email so offensively infantile @etherealhandmade couldn’t help but share it with the world. The creator is polite enough to avoid naming and shaming the business — even though they clearly deserve it — but she did share a screenshot of the mind-boggling return email for her viewers to enjoy.

“Hi Leah, Congratulations on making the worst business decision of your life,” the email reads, starting off nice and strong with truly high school levels of petulance. “It’s not every day I get to witness such an outstanding display of poor judgement. Clearly, you have a knack for missing out on opportunities that could actually make you money—because let’s be real, you’ll never see that kind of cash with your little venture.”

The entire email reads like a page straight out of the Burn Book, and really sticks the landing with “best of luck to your soon-to-be-forgotten business. You’ll need it.”

Congratulations, email-sender, you’re officially the most childish thing I’ve seen today — and I just finished writing about Lauren Boebert. Like her, you seem to have failed to mature past your pre-teen years, and it’s apparent through your atrocious professionalism and tenuous grasp on reality.

As if to drive that last point home, Ethereal Handmade has been absolutely flourishing in the wake of that simple TikTok. Outraged viewers are flocking to buy up the genuinely lovely jewelry offered up by Leah, and proudly contributing to the “soon-to-be-forgotten business” that’s quickly going to buy Leah a house.

She’s among a huge number of people who used the isolation of the pandemic to focus on new ventures, but her success is far more rare. More small business applications were put in during the COVID-19 pandemic than in any years surrounding, but many struggled to find — and maintain — a foothold. Leah is among the lucky few, and her wannabe business nemesis only helped in establishing Ethereal Handmade as a business to watch.

Quite a few people are, in the wake of the video, encouraging Leah to print off the email, design it into merch, and sell her main hater’s words for further profit. It’s a stellar idea, and one quite a few people are in support of, and — should she choose to do so — it may end up as the most creative middle finger we’ve ever seen.