"We’ve learned a lot in this process," Gap Brand North America President Marka Hansen said in a statement. "And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing."

The company was hit with a wave of near-universal revulsion when the design was made public. The Facebook page for the clothing company includes over a thousand responses to the altered logo, most of them bemoaning the change. The ridicule went viral as users created custom social media avatars mocking the logo. And after someone created a fake Gap Logo Twitter feed — @gaplogo — it now claims nearly 5,000 followers.

Bloomberg reports that the new logo was a part of a marketing strategy that had Gap "updating its clothing lines and stores to appeal to so-called Millennials." Surely the mention of that charged generational term doomed the entire project from the start. 

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: @NFreeman1234