OUT OF STYLE
Ivanka Trump brand sales have plummeted since boycott took over social media,
Even if you’re not much of a fashionista, it’s been hard to miss the firestorm that has recently engulfed the Ivanka Trump brand. Foreboding signs continue to pile up: Panjiva, a global trade data company, says that imports of products that bear the Ivanka Trump name were 54.4 per cent lower in the three months that ended Jan. 31compared to the three months that ended Sept. 30.
On social media, the boycott campaign called Grab Your Wallet is gaining fresh momentum. According to data from Captiv8, a social media analytics firm, there have been more than 496,000 “engagements” — likes, retweets and so on — since October on Twitter and Instagram posts that use the #grabyourwallet hashtag.
After a burst of activity in November and a cooldown in December and January, engagement on the hashtag soared to its highest level yet in early February.
In the retail world, big questions are swirling: How exactly did the Ivanka Trump brand fall so hard, so fast — particularly in the Nordstrom ecosystem? And where does the brand go from here?
Nordstrom says the plunge in sales of Ivanka Trump products became particularly pronounced in the back half of the year. This partially overlaps with the rise of Grab Your Wallet, which last autumn began urging shoppers to boycott retailers that carry goods affiliated with Trump family businesses.
But to suggest that the boycott alone is the culprit is to paint an incomplete picture.
The boycott is meant to send a message to retailers who do business with the Trumps and to hit the Trumps where it hurts most: in their pay cheques. The campaign also seeks to puncture the U.S. president’s image of his family as winners.
But legions of shoppers probably have been doing something much less tactical and premeditated. Imagine this scenario: A woman browses the dress department at Nordstrom, looking for something to wear to a job interview. She grabs an armful of frocks to take to the fitting room. She gives an Ivanka Trump fit-and-flare dress a glance, but ultimately leaves it on the rack.
The thought process there is less “stick it to the first family” and more “I don’t know if I feel comfortable having that in my closet.”
Unlike the boycotters, who want the brand banished from shelves, this shopper might not even care that Nordstrom carries it. She just doesn’t want to buy it herself.
And that quieter, less calculated avoidance can perhaps be just as harmful as a boycott. Consider, for a moment, the people who haven’t gone back to Chipotle much since the restaurant’s food contamination scares. They aren’t boycotting the burrito chain, they just found other options — and the blow to the company’s sales results and stock price have been devastating.
This is not to write off the boycotters of Trump merchandise. Brayden King, a professor at Northwestern University who has studied the attributes of successful boycotts, says it often comes down to how much media attention they generate — and Grab Your Wallet has certainly drummed up plenty of that, including from the Washington Post. That campaign has also driven potentially influential conversation around the topic on social media.
As the Ivanka Trump brand tries to craft a path forward for itself, much of the work of wooing customers could, in theory, be accomplished by creating a highly covetable product.
But that gets to one of the brand’s chief problems as it tries to recuperate from this setback: The Ivanka Trump line largely consists of reasonably attractive, but entirely unremarkable clothing for the 9-to-5 crowd. These are safe garments that you buy because they slot in like Tetris pieces to your wardrobe. The pencil skirt matches with several blouses you already have in your closet; the closed-toe pumps are reasonably comfy and adhere to your office’s buttoned-up dress code.
Department stores carry plenty of other lines with similar esthetics and prices — and far less baggage. For merchants and shoppers alike, convenient alternatives abound. The Ivanka Trump line doesn’t give them anything they can’t get anywhere else.
And then there’s this: a department store such as Nordstrom relies on certain beloved, aspirational brands to make itself a draw for shoppers, such as Coach or Burberry. But much of the time, the dynamic works in the opposite direction, with small brands relying on the cachet and gravitational pull of the department store to get people to give them a try.
The Ivanka Trump brand is almost surely in that latter category. The line reportedly brought in $14.3 million (U.S.) in sales at Nordstrom in the most recent full fiscal year.
Based on Nordstrom’s earnings forecasts, that will likely amount to less than one-10th of 1 per cent of the company’s total sales haul for the year.