Winners Bans Fur After Years of PETA Pressure

With Fur off the Racks Across All TJX Companies, Group Focuses on Push to Drop Angora

For Immediate Release:
October 13, 2020

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

Following a nearly 20-year PETA campaign that included numerous meetings with PETA representatives, e-mails from more than 90,000 of the group’s supporters, and protests by local activists, discount retailer Winners has banned fur.

Winners was the last TJX Companies brand to sell fur; after PETA started calling on the company to go fur-free in 2001, its other brands started dropping the material, first in Europe and then in the U.S. Winners’ move means that all of TJX Companies’ 4,500+ stores (including HomeSense and Marshalls in Canada) are now fur-free—and PETA is renewing its call for the brands to stop selling angora, too.

“Rabbits, coyotes, and other animals are winning big with Winners’ decision to drop fur,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA hopes this will be the first of many changes for the better at TJX Companies, with a ban on hair painfully torn out of angora rabbits’ skin soon to follow.”

On angora rabbit farms, workers repeatedly stretch terrified rabbits across a board or hang them from the ceiling and rip their hair out as they scream. After two to five years, workers hang them upside down, slit their throats, and sell their carcasses.

TJX Companies joins hundreds of top designers and retailers—including Nordstrom, Macy’s, ASOS, Gap Inc., H&M, Intermix, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Gucci—that have banned fur.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.