Earlier this week, Donald Trump whined online about unfair treatment when retail giant Nordstrom decided to drop Ivanka Trump’s line of merch from its stores. Trump and his cohorts went on to outright accuse the department-store chain of dropping the president’s daughter’s line for “political reasons.” Say-anything White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer described the company’s decision this way: “This is a direct attack on his policies and her name and so there’s clearly an attempt for [Trump] to stand up for her being maligned because they have a problem with his policies.”
The company disputed the accusations of political targeting. “Each year we cut about 10 percent and refresh our assortment with about the same amount. In this case, based on the brand’s performance we’ve decided not to buy it for this season,” a Nordstrom spokesperson explained to the Seattle Times this week. But how was the brand performance? The Wall Street Journal got hold of the company’s internal sales numbers and on Saturday reported that Ivanka’s sales had fallen by nearly a third over the past year.
Sales of Ivanka Trump’s fashion line tumbled 32% at Nordstrom Inc. last fiscal year, with the declines deepening in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, according to internal Nordstrom data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Amid calls to boycott the brand, Ivanka Trump footwear and apparel sales fell more than 70% in the second, third and fourth weeks of October compared with a year ago, the Nordstrom data show …
At Nordstrom, Ivanka Trump footwear and apparel sales totaled $14.3 million in the fiscal year ended in January, down from $20.9 million in the previous year, according to the data reviewed by the Journal. The sales fell in 45 of the 52 weeks. The brand’s decline at Nordstrom occurred even as the chain’s overall sales rose in a difficult retail market. Total sales increased 7.2% to $3.5 billion in the quarter ended Oct. 29, and gained 3% to $10.2 billion in the nine-month period.
That’s a pretty serious decline, and no one respects the bottom line more than Donald J. Trump. Politics may have been at play here, but it’s Donald Trump’s politics, not the retailers, that have proved costly.
