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Nordstrom drops Ivanka Trump’s brand amid threats of boycott, citing declining sales

By Greg Hadley

ghadley@mcclatchy.com

February 02, 2017 11:09 PM

Ivanka Trump has been involved in the fashion industry since she partnered with Nordstrom to sell her line of shoes in 2011. Diane Bondareff DIANE BONDAREFF/INVISION/AP

#GrabYourWallet has claimed another victory.

The push by activists to boycott companies with business ties to President Donald Trump and his family had already succeeded in persuading Shoes.com to drop Trump shoes from its inventory, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to step down from Trump’s economic advisory forum. Now, department store chain Nordstrom has announced it will not carry first daughter Ivanka Trump’s fashion line in 2017.

News of the move first emerged Wednesday, as Bloomberg reported that Trump’s brand had been removed from Nordstrom’s master list of brands sold by the company and that the chain planned to phase out her products.

However, Business Insider later reported Thursday that all of Ivanka Trump’s products were gone from the company’s website, though several reappeared as of Thursday night. On Twitter, Nordstrom began responding to people questioning why the brand had vanished.

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“Each year we cut about 10 percent (of brands) and refresh our assortment with about the same amount,” a Nordstrom spokesperson told Business Insider. “In this case, based on the brand’s performance we’ve decided not to buy it for this season.”

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On social media, Nordstrom repeated the stance it voiced when activists slammed it for continuing to carry the brand: The decision was purely business, not a political statement one way or the other.

In November, as the Grab Your Wallet campaign blasted Nordstrom along with more than a dozen other companies for carrying Trump’s products, the company responded by saying on Twitter that “we recognize our customers can make choices about what they purchase based on personal views & we'll continue to give them options.”

On Thursday, Nordstrom did not say whether the company’s executives believed the boycott had hurt sales, but on social media, Grab Your Wallet activists were quick to claim victory.

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