By David Fahrenthold and Sarah Halzack / The Washington Post
Nordstrom will stop selling Ivanka Trump’s name-branded line of clothing and shoes, a company spokesperson said Thursday.
The change followed a weeks-long boycott campaign, organized by an anti-Trump activist group called “Grab Your Wallet.” The group demanded the department-store giant cease doing business with the president or his family.
In a statement, the spokesperson for Nordstrom said that Ivanka Trump products were being dropped for poor sales. Its statement did not mention the group’s boycott effort.
“Each year we cut about 10% (of brands) and refresh our assortment with about the same amount,” the statement said. “In this case, based on the brand’s performance we’ve decided not to buy it for this season.”
The retailer still has some Ivanka Trump items in stock, a spokesperson said, and will sell through that remaining inventory.
On the company’s website Thursday evening, the only Ivanka Trump branded items available were four styles of shoe, all being sold at a discount.
Shannon Coulter, who helps run Grab Your Wallet, said that number is down sharply from early December, when Nordstrom had 71 Ivanka Trump items for sale.
She celebrated Nordstrom’s decision as a milestone for the campaign, which began in October after The Washington Post obtained a video from 2005 that showed Donald Trump bragging about groping women during a taping of “Access Hollywood.” In that video, Trump boasted that he could “grab them by the p—-y,” using a vulgar term for a woman’s genitals.
Four days after The Post’s story, on Oct. 11, Coulter posted a message on Twitter criticizing Nordstrom for doing business with Ivanka Trump. She said the retailer should disassociate itself from Ivanka Trump, because she had continued to campaign for her father in the aftermath of the tape’s release.
Weeks later, Nordstrom had remained a focus of the boycott group’s effort. Earlier on Thursday, in fact, her group had asked its followers to call the retail giant’s headquarters in large numbers.
“The cause and effect here is very clear,” Coulter wrote in an email message Thursday evening, after Nordstrom announced its decision. “Over 230,000 Tweets and who knows how many millions of dollars’ worth of missed purchases later, they finally heard us.”
The “Grab Your Wallet” campaign has now targeted more than 60 companies – a group that includes Trump’s own golf courses and hotels, those that sell Trump-branded goods, and other businesses whose leaders endorsed Trump or donated to his campaign.
“The people who voted against Donald Trump may have lost at the ballot box, but they can win at the cash register,” Coulter said. So far, they have removed five companies from the list, after they stopped selling Ivanka Trump’s merchandise.
Ivanka Trump’s business began with a jewelry collection in 2007, and has grown to include clothing, shoes, fragrances, handbags and other products. A spokesman for the business did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday evening.
Ivanka Trump herself intends to resign all mangement positions in her company and her father’s Trump Organization, attorneys for the Trump Organization have said. On Thursday, the attorneys told the news site ProPublica that the paperwork would be entirely completed on Friday.
Ivanka Trump has now moved from New York to Washington, where she has served as an adviser to her father.
The news of Nordstrom’s decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.
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