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.
“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.”
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.
There are still several major retailers that sell Trump products, including Macy’s, Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, Jet, Marshalls, Lord and Taylor, Bloomingdale’s and others. The Grab Your Wallet campaign is aimed at boycotting pressuring these companies to drop all Trump-related merchandise, given the extreme wealth of the president and his family.
But Nordstrom and Ivanka Trump have had a particularly lengthy business relationship since 2011, when Trump was launching her first line of footwear, per Bloomberg. In a statement to CNN , a Trump spokesperson made reference to that relationship in response to Thursday’s news.
“The strong relationship between Nordstrom and the Ivanka Trump brand was instrumental in the evolution of the brand when it was one category and the brand has since expanded to multiple categories,” the spokesperson said.
