Ivanka Trump has decided to shut down her namesake fashion brand as she switches her focus to policy in Washington “for the foreseeable future,” according to a statement. Criticism of the brand intensified after the 2016 presidential election when she opted to work as a senior advisor for her father, President Donald Trump, while retaining ownership of the brand.
Nordstrom was the first retailer to eliminate the brand from its merchandise offering in February 2017. While Nordstrom claimed its decision to drop the Ivanka Trump-branded products was performance-related and not political, Hudson’s Bay Co. followed suit in dropping the brand, while Neiman Marcus and TJX scaled back or changed the way they displayed the merchandise.Grab Your Wallet, an anti-Trump boycott organizer, monitored companies that were selling or dropping the brand.
The brand has been mired in controversy. The Washington Post reported that Ivanka Trump fashion products are manufactured primarily by women working in sweatshop labor conditions in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, despite President Trump’s insistence that U.S. citizens “buy American.” In response, women’s advocacy organization UltraViolet started a petition demanding Macy’s drop the line. In the first 24 hours after the petition’s unveiling, more than 31,000 people signed it, but Macy’s never dropped the brand.
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The business is privately held and doesn’t disclose sales or other financial information, but Nordstrom’s assessment of the brand’s performance appears to be sincere. Online sales of the Ivanka Trump brand sold at Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Zappos fell nearly 55% in the 12 months prior to June 2018, according to Rakuten Intelligence, which gathers email receipts from 5.5 million U.S. consumers.
“Views on the brand have become highly polarized and it has become a lightning rod for protests and boycotts,” said Neil Saunders, Managing Director of GlobalData Retail in a statement. “While the company is still viable, doing business has become far more challenging and these problems will only increase.”
The company also has come under attack by government ethics experts for trademarks granted by foreign governments such as China seeking to curry favor with the president.
The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called the shutdown “a notable step in the right direction,” but added that it “comes much too late.”
In the White House, Ivanka Trump continued to receive certain financial information and a share of the company’s profits. The financial disclosure form she filed in June 2018 showed the trust was valued at over $50 million and brought in more than $5 million in income in 2017.
