Nordstrom Inc. has spent months trying to maintain a neutral profile despite being a prominent retail outlet for Ivanka Trump’s fashion label. The strategy hasn’t quite worked out as planned.
After Nordstrom sought quietly to wind down its relationship with Trump, citing poor sales, her father slammed the department store chain, claiming Wednesday on his personal Twitter account that the company treated his daughter “unfairly.”
The outcry was swift on both sides of America’s political chasm. President Trump’s message was retweeted by the official presidential Twitter account and posted on Facebook and Instagram. His supporters flocked to Ivanka’s defense, calling for a boycott while anti-Trump legions questioned whether the president should be shilling for his daughter’s business. Even Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman, chimed in, saying Trump’s daughter was being “maligned” by the Seattle-based company.
As a result, Nordstrom now faces multiple boycott threats. It remains on Grab Your Wallet’s list, an anti-Trump boycott movement, because it hasn’t finished selling its Ivanka products. (Nordstrom shares, meanwhile, were up $1.45, to $44.21, at 2:57 p.m. in New York trading.)
My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017
“It’s a testament to the strength and influence of the Grab Your Wallet movement that Donald felt he had to comment on our biggest success to date,” said Shannon Coulter, a co-founder of Grab Your Wallet. “But I do have concerns that Donald appears to be using his office to punish companies that prefer not to do business with his family.”
Yet, unlike such big consumer-facing companies as Starbucks Corp. and Nike Inc., which have made explicit statements against some Trump policies, Nordstrom has been trying to escape the political firestorm for months. But to no avail.
In November, Co-President Pete Nordstrom tried to address the controversy surrounding the partnership with Ivanka in an e-mail to employees, according to Fortune. He said the company had been targeted by customers on both sides, threatening to boycott the chain if they continued or discontinued its relationship with Trump.
“This is a sharply divisive subject,” he said. “No matter what we do, we are going to end up disappointing some of our customers. Every single brand we offer is evaluated on their results—if people don’t buy it, we won’t sell it.”
The company also posted a circumspect response to a shopper’s open letter calling for it to stop selling the Trump brand.