Video: Chaos at Coach! PETA Disrupts Annual Meeting in Push to End Leather Sales
For Immediate Release:
November 14, 2024
Contact:
Maddy Missett 202-483-7382
Coach’s New York headquarters was the site of a surprise sensory onslaught today, as dozens of PETA supporters took over the building lobby during the company’s annual meeting calling for an end to its sales of animal- and planet-killing leather. Demonstrators chanted through megaphones, deployed noisemakers, wrote “Leather Kills” on the building’s front windows, and posed as a “dead window display” with a bloody “cow head.” The building was locked down and two protesters were arrested while shouting, “Coach has blood on its hands!” peta2, PETA’s youth division, also joined in on the action as part of its campaign calling on Coachtopia—the brand’s latest attempt to pander to Gen Z—to stop marketing ground-up leather scraps as “sustainable.” Photos and videos of the action are available here.
During the meeting, PETA confronted Coach leadership with a question on behalf of PETA’s fellow shareholders: “Leather is cruel. Cows are castrated, branded, and tail-docked—often without painkillers; alligators flail after their necks are hacked; ostriches have their feathers ripped from their bodies; snakes are skinned while moving. These are present-day industry nightmares. Coach says it wants a better-made future. It can do that using innovative materials that don’t come from animals. When will our company’s action match its words and replace these cruel products with innovative, vegan ones?”
Credit: PETA
“Leather is the new fur, and just like fur, it was sliced off the bodies of suffering animals who lived their entire lives in misery,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on Coach to get animals’ skin off its shelves and urges compassionate shoppers to buy only kind and luxurious vegan materials.”
Cows have friends, hold grudges against other cows, and mourn when a loved one dies or when they’re separated from each other. A PETA exposé of the world’s largest leather processor—which has been linked to Coach—showed that workers brand calves on the face, beat cows and bulls, and shock them with electric prods. The leather industry also contributes to climate catastrophe, land devastation, deforestation, pollution, water contamination, and biodiversity loss.
Today’s attention-grabbing demonstration was a preview of PETA’s inaugural Free the Animals Friday, a Black Friday event in which PETA supporters will converge on Coach stores across the country with a series of eye-popping protests encouraging holiday shoppers to avoid cruel leather and choose compassionate vegan options instead.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
