The woman behind the Trump boycott
Shannon Coulter founded campaign to discourage spending at stores featuring the family’s brands
Back in October, Shannon Coulter was doing some late-night browsing on the Nordstrom website. Before long, the small-business owner had a nagging feeling about the department store’s lineup of Ivanka Trump apparel and shoes — a brand she couldn’t help but see in a different light amid the unfolding events of the presidential campaign.
Just days earlier, news had broken of the explosive Access Hollywood footage in which Donald Trump bragged about groping women without their consent.
“Something changed for me when the Trump tapes came out,” Coulter recalled in an interview. “Those words were just ringing in my ears.”
And so she decided to take action: Coulter began a campaign called Grab Your Wallet, which encourages shoppers to stay away from retailers that sell all manner of Trump-branded goods, as well as to avoid Trump properties such as golf courses and wineries.
She maintains a meticulous spreadsheet online of the dozens of companies that should be boycotted, including notations about why they’re on the list and updates about the inventory of Trump-branded merchandise they offer.
Those that cease doing business with the Trumps are removed from the list.
The campaign has been chugging along for months, but it has come into a particularly bright spotlight in recent weeks, when big-name chains started to back away from Trump goods.
These include Neiman Marcus, Belk and, most prominently, Nordstrom — the store that encouraged Coulter to fire up her laptop in the first place.
None of the companies cited the boycott specifically as the reason for dropping the merchandise. Nordstrom said it did so because of falling sales, not politics.
Still, Coulter exemplifies the new and potent possibilities that social media presents for ordinary consumers and voters to catapult an idea for activism from their living rooms to like-minded people across the country — and to the centre of the news cycle.
Consumer activist was not exactly a familiar role for Coulter, 45, when she decided to launch the boycott.
“Like many college students, I was more politically minded back then. But that part of my life has been really dormant my entire adult years,” Coulter said.
“I was very much a straight-ahead career girl for the last 24 years, and it feels like that’s changed now.”
But now, Grab Your Wallet has practically become a full-time job: Coulter, a resident of the San Francisco Bay area, has outsourced all of her client work at her small marketing firm.
That marketing background, she says, has been a critical component of her ability to grow Grab Your Wallet.
Coulter’s career also has given her experience creating social media content for brands, so she came into this with a feel for what grabs readers’ attention in their newsfeeds, and what encourages them to share posts with their own followers.
According to an analysis by Captiv8, a firm that studies social media influence, there have been more than 496,000 “engagements” — likes, retweets, and the like — on Twitter or Instagram posts that include #grabyourwallet.
Coulter’s day-to-day work on Grab Your Wallet comes in different forms: She regularly tracks how much online inventory individual retailers are carrying of Trump-related goods.
And, perhaps most importantly, she spends time on Facebook and Twitter interacting with fellow boycotters.