Qurate Retail Group and Williams-Sonoma Dump Mohair After PETA Exposé Sent today to select West Chester, PA; select Philadelphia; and select San Francisco; select Seattle, WA; select St. Petersburg, FL

Retail Giants Join Hundreds of Mohair-Banning Brands After Investigation Reveals Workers Mutilated, Killed Goats

For Immediate Release:
November 21, 2018

Contact:
Audrey Shircliff 202-483-7382

After hearing from PETA, Qurate Retail Group and Williams-Sonoma, Inc., have banned cruelly obtained mohair across their leading brands—including QVC, HSN, zulily, Ballard Designs, Frontgate, Garnet Hill, Grandin Road, and Improvements and Williams-Sonoma, Williams-Sonoma Home, Pottery Barn, PBteen, Pottery Barn Kids, west elm, Mark and Graham, and Rejuvenation, respectively.

The move from Qurate—a $14-billion company that reaches approximately 370 million homes worldwide through television networks, e-commerce sites, mobile apps, print catalogs, and more—and Williams-Sonoma follows PETA’s first-of-its-kind video exposé of the mohair industry in South Africa, which is the source of more than 50 percent of the world’s mohair. The exposé shows that shearers—who are paid by volume, not by the hour—worked recklessly, leaving angora goats with gaping wounds. Workers then roughly stitched the animals up without giving them any pain relief. And unwanted goats died in agonizing ways: One worker slowly cut their throats with a dull knife while they were fully conscious and then broke their necks, hacking one animal’s head right off. Others were hauled to a slaughterhouse, where they were electrically shocked, hung upside down, and slashed across the throat.

“PETA’s exposé brought the violence of the mohair industry out of the shadows,” says PETA Senior Director of Corporate Affairs Anne Brainard. “Qurate and Williams-Sonoma are now part of a long list of compassionate, business-savvy companies that have taken a stand against cruelty to animals.”

After PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—provided law-enforcement agencies in South Africa with the evidence from the exposé, the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals filed cruelty-to-animals charges against four angora goat farmers. The South African Police Service is now investigating the farmers along with shearers and farmworkers.

Qurate Retail Group and Williams-Sonoma join more than 340 brands worldwide that have banned mohair, including Ralph Lauren, Diane von Furstenberg, Brooks Brothers, Gap, H&M, Topshop, UNIQLO, Overstock.com, and Zara.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.