Sears Holdings Corp’s (NASDAQ:SHLD) Sears and Kmart are joining the list of retailers dropping brands connected to President Donald Trump.
The decision had Sears Holdings Corp removing 31 items from the Trump Home brand from its online Sears and Kmart stores over the weekend. Neither of these retailers actually carried the items in their physical stores.
“As part of the company’s initiative to optimize its online product assortment, we constantly refine that assortment to focus on our most profitable items,” Brian Hanover, a Sears Holdings Corp spokesman, told Reuters about the decision to drop the Trump Home items from Kmart and Sears.
Sears Holdings Corp notes that customers can still find Trump brands on its Sears and Kmart websites. However, these items are sold by third-party vendors, and not by SHLD itself.
It wasn’t just Sears and Kmart that were removing Trump brand items from stores over the weekend. Burlington Stores Inc (NYSE:BURL) also removed merchandise from the Ivanka Trump brand from its online stores. It is unknown if the company’s physical retail locations are still carrying the products.
The trend of removing Trump brands from stores started with Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE:JWN) earlier this month. JWN said that it will stop carrying the Ivanka Trump brand due to poor sales. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal claims that the company saw brand sales decline by 70% in the weeks leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election.
TJX Companies Inc’s (NYSE:TJX) T.J. Maxx also started removing signs for the Ivanka Trump brand from its stores last week. However, the company claims that it is only moving the products to its racks and that it will continue to sell them to customers.
(Updated to clarify that third-party vendors can still sell Trump brand items through Sears’ and Kmart’s online stores.)
