Ralph Lauren, Urban Outfitters, Guess, Others Have a New Shareholder — PETA
Group Buys Stock During Market Slump to Push Companies to Ban Wool, Mohair, and Cashmere
For Immediate Release:
April 7, 2020
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
Amid the COVID-19 stock market downturn, PETA has purchased stock in nearly two dozen companies—including Ralph Lauren, Urban Outfitters, and Guess—in order to push them to ban wool, mohair, and cashmere.
“Today’s kind consumers want to support companies that share their values and sell chic and comfortable vegan sweaters and coats only,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is heading to the boardroom to pressure retailers from Ralph Lauren to Urban Outfitters not to sell items that animals suffered and died for.”
A PETA exposé of the mohair industry in South Africa and a PETA Asia investigation of cashmere farms and slaughterhouses in China and Mongolia showed that goats were left with bloody, gaping wounds from the rough hair-removal process. They died in agonizing ways: They were hit with hammers, and some were dragged by one leg onto the slaughterhouse floor, where their throats were slit. And just recently, a shearer pleaded guilty to cruelty to animals after being caught beating sheep in the face with heavy electric clippers during a PETA Asia investigation of sheep-shearing crews in Australia—the 13th investigation of the global wool industry that PETA and its international affiliates have released.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—frequently purchases the minimum number of shares necessary in clothing companies in order to attend annual meetings, liaise with shareholders, and influence management decisions from the inside. The other companies targeted in this effort include Burberry; Chico’s FAS, Inc.; Express; J.Jill; Deckers Outdoor Corporation (the parent company of UGG); Tapestry, Inc. (the parent company of Coach NY, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman); Aritzia; Lands’ End; Capri Holdings (the parent company of Michael Kors and Versace); Target; Under Armour; and Qurate Retail Group (the parent company of QVC and HSN).
PETA opposes speciesism, the human-supremacist worldview that animals are nothing more than commodities. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
