The Auckland District Court has ordered Brand Developers Ltd, the company behind The TV Shop, to pay $1,104,000 after its own staff wrote glowing product reviews while unhappy customers were quietly filtered out. The Commerce Commission announced the penalty on Tuesday 11 August 2026, closing a prosecution that began three years ago.
Most New Zealanders will know the company without knowing its name. Brand Developers is the direct response retailer behind Thin Lizzy cosmetics, the Renovator Transforma Ladder and the Air Roaster Pro, sold through late night infomercials, catalogues and its own website. The business model depends on persuading people to buy something they have never touched, which makes the star rating on the product page do a lot of work.
That is exactly what the court found had been engineered. In December 2025 the District Court convicted the company on 13 charges under the Fair Trading Act covering conduct spanning close to four years. This week’s hearing set the price.
The Commission said staff members posted positive reviews on the company’s own site and on other platforms without ever disclosing that they worked there. In some cases employees reviewed products they had not used at all. Friends and family were also asked to leave reviews. None of it carried any marker that the writer had a connection to the seller.
The second half of the operation was subtler and, for shoppers, harder to detect. Reviews of one, two or three stars were held back from publication unless the customer replied to a follow up email from the company. Plenty of people who leave a middling review never open that email, so the rating never appears. For a stretch during 2020 no low rating reviews were published at all. The site was not showing a distorted average so much as a curated one.
Commerce Commission deputy chair Anne Callinan said that when staff post reviews without disclosing their affiliation, or when a business removes negative reviews, “you are effectively tricking potential customers”. Judge Belinda Sellars KC described the conduct as “deliberate and systematic” and found that managers and executives knew about it and at times directed it.
The reviews were only part of the case. The court also found the company misled customers about their rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act. Call centre staff were told to tell people that the company’s own 30 day money back guarantee and risk free trial were the only remedies available to them. They are not. Consumer Guarantees Act rights apply to goods sold to ordinary shoppers regardless of what a retailer’s policy says, they cannot be contracted out of in consumer sales, and they last as long as is reasonable for the product rather than for 30 days. A shopper told the guarantee window had closed would have had no reason to push further.
There was also a straightforward advertising problem. For three years the Air Roaster Pro was promoted with a free or bonus accessory pack. The pack had always been part of the standard product. Nobody received anything extra.
This is not the company’s first appearance in front of a judge. In 2022 it was fined $123,500 for failing to meet extended warranty disclosure rules between May 2020 and March 2021. In 2015 it was fined $153,000 over claims that a ladder held a safety certification it did not have. Each penalty has been larger than the last.
A separate and much heavier case is still ahead of it. In February 2026 the Commission filed one of its first unconscionable conduct prosecutions against the company over the sale of high value TEBO and Bambillo branded beds and chairs between August 2022 and June 2024. The Commission alleges high pressure selling, unaffordable long term payment plans and aggressive retention and debt collection aimed at vulnerable buyers, including people with cognitive impairment and people with serious illness. Callinan said at the time that the alleged conduct was some of the worst the Commission had seen. Those allegations have not been tested in court and the company has not yet answered them.
The $1.1 million figure is easily the biggest review manipulation penalty New Zealand has produced. The previous benchmark was set in 2019, when holiday home manager Bachcare was convicted and fined $117,000 after editing guest reviews and withholding others. More than 900 of roughly 6,800 reviews posted between June 2017 and September 2018 never went up. That was the first case of its kind here.
Both penalties were set under a regime that is about to get sharper teeth. The current maximum under the Fair Trading Act is $200,000 per breach for an individual and $600,000 for a company. The Fair Trading Amendment Bill introduced in May 2026 would lift that to $1 million for an individual and $5 million for a company, or three times the commercial gain, whichever is greater. Submissions to the Finance and Expenditure Committee closed on 16 July 2026. Had the new numbers applied to this case, the arithmetic in the boardroom would have looked very different.
For anyone shopping online, the practical lesson sits in the shape of the ratings rather than the wording of any single review. A product with hundreds of reviews and almost nothing below four stars is unusual. Real products collect complaints about delivery, sizing and durability even when they are good. A page that is uniformly positive has either been very lucky or has been managed. The Commission has published guidance for businesses on collecting and displaying reviews, and its position is now plainly stated. Withholding bad reviews is not tidying up. It is misleading conduct, and it carries a bill.
Have you bought something off the back of reviews that turned out to be nothing like the product? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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