FASHION $ LIFESTYLE: Why Ivanka Trump Is Closing Down Her Fashion Brand

Ivanka Trump is shutting down her namesake retail business, 17 months after starting her work at the White House as a senior adviser to her father, the president of the United States. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company’s 18 employees have been informed that it will be closing and that Ivanka will address them later today.

“Ms. Trump had contemplated the move in recent months,” the article says, “as she grew frustrated by the restrictions she placed on the company, IT Collection LLC, to avoid possible conflicts of interest while serving in the White House.”

Trump’s brand sells moderately priced (and frequently floral) wardrobe basics, shoes, handbags, and jewellery, and her website also hosts a blog that covers such She-EO–adjacent topics as “How to Create an Inclusive Work Culture”. Having cultivated a reputation for herself as a model for working American women long before entering the administration — Ivanka Trump HQ launched a Women Who Work campaign in 2014 — there is a clear overlap between the issues Trump has focused on in her White House work and the lifestyle her brand, in which she still has a vested financial interest, purports to offer.

But Trump has heretofore been seemingly unbothered about such conflicts of interest; she has continued to wear her sheath dresses and pumps from her own label to events she attends as a White House employee, even after watchdog group Democracy Forward sent a letter to the Office of Government Ethics in January demanding an investigation into her using her public position for private financial gain. As recently as this past May, she was awarded seven new trademarks from the Chinese government around the same time her father, Donald Trump, vowed to help ZTE, a behemoth Chinese telecommunications company. And there was the meeting she took way back in 2016, about one week after the election, with her father and Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe at Trump Tower. Shortly after, it was reported that Ivanka’s company was about to close a deal with apparel company Sanei International, owned in part by the Japanese government — that agreement subsequently disintegrated.

You can see why it might be annoying for Trump to continue to swat down backlash that she shouldn’t be using her proximity to the American government to hawk necklaces that say “opportunity is everywhere.” When discussing her reasons for not selling the company shortly after the election, she told CBS News that it was to prevent outsiders from “licensing and leveraging the name of the 45th president of the United States of America — completely unfettered,” which is obviously what Trump wanted to do herself (it’s called leaning in, people).

Proponents of the #GrabYourWallet campaign, which urged customers to boycott stores that sold Ivanka Trump items, are celebrating the brand’s shuttering as a win; several retailers like Nordstrom, Jet.com, and Gilt dropped the fashion line in the past year and a half. The Wall Street Journal reports that while the brand’s sales have fallen in recent months, a company spokesperson argued that the decline was due to high sales during and immediately after the 2016 election. Either way, we know that Donald Trump will attribute this move to the shrewd business acumen the Trump name is known for and likely tweet about how Ivanka is a high-quality person.