Ivanka Trump Brand Pulled From Department Store After Poor 'Performance'

Hudson's Bay Company, the Canadian retail group that owns Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, [...]

By Daniel S. Levine

Hudson's Bay Company, the Canadian retail group that owns Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, pulled Ivanka Trump's fashion line from its website, citing poor performance.

"Hudson's Bay is phasing out this brand through the fall based on its performance," a company representative said in a statement to CNBC. "As part of our regular course of business, we review our merchandise offerings and make appropriate changes."

Shannon Coulter, who co-founded the #GrabYourWallet movement, first noticed that the Trump products were missing from the Hudson's Bay website.

"There are suddenly zero Ivanka Trump items on the [Hudson's Bay] website. Yesterday there were still over 150 items there. What's going on? Has the Bay finally dropped the Ivanka Trump brand?" she tweeted on Friday.

Coulter co-founded #GrabYourWallet to provide a list of companies still selling products or supporting President Donald Trump and his family's brands. Last year, the movement gained attention for organizing a boycott of Nordstrom, which said its decision was also based on performance.

"We made this decision based on performance," a Nordstrom spokesperson told NBC News in February 2017. "Over the past year, and particularly in the last half of 2016, sales of the brand have steadily declined to the point where it didn't make good business sense for us to continue with the line for now."

Nordstrom said its executives had been talking with Trump's team in the past year and told her about their plans to drop her line in early January 2017. Still, a Trump spokesperson insisted the company caved to pressure from advocacy groups.

"My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible," President Trump tweeted on Feb. 8, 2017.

"This was absolutely not political... it was exclusively based on the performance of the brand," a Nordstrom spokesperson told Refinery29.

Coulter believes the poor performance of Trump's clothes at Hudson's Bay stores is a result of boycotts against her father's immigration policies and recent tariffs imposed on Canada.

"When international attention recently settled on the Trump administration for forcibly separating thousands of children from their parents immediately after the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Canada, that really put Hudson's Bay in the hot seat and kept them there for several weeks," Coulter wrote in an email to CTV News.

"This gives me hope because it means there are a lot of people out there willing to fight against racism with their own hard earned money. In any case, we're in it for the long haul and glad you are too. Grab that wallet, folks," Coulter tweeted Saturday.

Hudson's Bay Company is based in Brampton, Ontario and owns Home Outfitters, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue and Hudson's Bay stores.

Photo credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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