Ivanka Trump is shutting down her namesake clothing and shoe company, she announced Tuesday.
“After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business, but I do know that my focus for the foreseeable future will be the work I am doing here in Washington, so making this decision now is the only fair outcome for my team and partners,” Trump said in a statement.
It’s been more than a year since Trump separated herself from the company to joined her father at the White House as a senior adviser, but she continued to receive profits from her brand and view certain financial information.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump had become tired of the difficulties of avoiding conflicts of interest arising from her status as a White House senior adviser. Don’t you hate it when your ethically dubious choices become a whole “problem”?
A spokesperson for the company emphasized that the decision “has nothing to do with the performance of the brand and is based solely on Ivanka’s decision to remain in Washington indefinitely,” BBC News reported.
But it’s true that the company had been performing poorly over the months.
“It’s just never recovered since she stepped away from the company,” a source told Page Six.
Online sales of the Ivanka Trump brand sold online on Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Zappos fell almost 45 percent in the 12 months to June compared to the previous period, the Journal reported.
A spokesperson tried to save face by attributing the enormous decline to having had high online sales in early 2017, when there was “newfound awareness” of the brand after Trump became president, the paper said.
Company sales did in fact grow during the 2016 presidential election. Unfortunately, the success was short-lived. Anti-Trump groups critical of her father’s policies boycotted her fashion line. Nordstrom Inc. and Hudson’s Bay ditched Ivanka Trump products altogether.
Sales continued to fall despite attempts from President Trump, who criticized Nordstrom for treating his daughter “so unfairly” and from senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, who urged everyone to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff” in a televised interview.