After hearing the bad news about J.Crew this week, my friend Jenny took it upon herself to do a little additional research. Never one to give up easily, she made an interesting discovery :
"Okay, so the J.Crew news was festering in my mind and this morning I decided to quickly Google for some extra info. Like I need to add another project to my list of to-dos.
So first, I found news articles discussing J.Crew's use of fur for the first time this year. Any article mentioning that the fur was sourced from China was written by PETA. All other sources only said J.Crew was using fur and was under fire from anti-fur groups. No mention of China.
Then I started wondering how PETA would know that it's coming from China, but I couldn't find anything about that without going to the PETA website which I didn't really want to do from work.
Thennnn I thought I'd go to the J.Crew website, thinking maybe they'd address these issues somewhere on the site, which leads me to the interesting part of this whole story: I don't see ANY fur on the site at all!!!! China or no China, I wonder if the anti-fur pressure made them scrap the whole line?"
She's right! J.Crew has taken all of their items with fur down from their main online catalog. You can only access the web pages for those products through the search function, where you can search by item number or key word. I searched for "fur" and they all popped up.
It's exciting that they reacted to the anti-fur pressure in some way, but I'm not sure if it's enough for us to go back to buying J.Crew stuff, yet. Thoughts?
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But they are still selling it?
They're selling only a handful of the previously offered fur items. Nothing labeled "coyote fur" or "fox fur." Mainly the things you can still get are a couple of those jackets with the lining, but the hats and stoles, and cashmere sweaters with the big fur collars all seem to be gone.
I talked to my brother about this over Thanksgiving. And he had some interesting opinions. First, their new CEO has changed their marketing a bit by adding fur and other expensive items, in order to avoid being the "I shop at J. Crew when things go on sale". I guess they did a bunch of research and found people really only shopped at J. Crew once the items they really wanted were at a huge discount. So they thought, we'll still have the sales, but now, we are going to put that cashmere sweater and that fur jacket right along side those sale items, so that, while you might not buy, it will inherently change the image of J. Crew. It won't be the "sale place". It will be thought of as high-end fashion.
Interesting, huh.
that's one way of doing it, certainly. i'd think though, the most lgoical and least expensive route would be to simply not discount items so heavily...rather than designing, developing, outsourcing, and spending marketing dollars on new items. but that's just me, what do i know?
Another interesting comment from Jenny:
They've pushed back their IPO until 2006. Wonder if it was all related? I still really want to know if it was sourced from China. It seems like such an obvious and huge risk that I find it hard to believe a large and succesful company like J.Crew would take.
This is all totally independent of the fact that I'm searching for a way to be able to continue to shop there. : )
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