German fashion house Hugo Boss and other international brands are being boycotted by the Chinese Communist Party for opposing forced labor in Xinjiang, but the latest results show the company’s sales in mainland China are still growing fast.
Yves Mueller, acting chief executive of Hugo Boss, said the company’s sales in China nearly doubled in the first quarter, Reuters reported on May 5.
In March, the Chinese Communist Party “boycotted” a series of international brands such as H&M, Nike, Adidas and Burberry for refusing to use cotton harvested by suspected slave laborers in Xinjiang, setting off a wave of boycotts in the country, with dozens of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese Dozens of artists from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan announced that they would terminate their cooperation with these brands.
Hugo Boss had said on its official Weibo account that it would continue to source and support Xinjiang cotton. But in a statement sent to Deutsche Welle, the company said it was “committed to respecting human rights” and “has not purchased any products directly from Xinjiang to date”. And the statement on Hugo Boss’ official website that it has joined the BCI organization against Xinjiang cotton has not been removed.
After the Communist Party used nationalism to boycott the international brand, at least three Chinese stars said they would no longer endorse Hugo Boss, and some netizens followed suit. But the brand’s sales in mainland China were up 29 percent on a currency-adjusted basis compared with the first quarter of 2019, before the outbreak. This growth trend continued at the start of the second quarter, Mueller said. At 07:42 a.m. GMT today, Hugo Boss shares were up 4.2 percent.
Some H&M stores and outlets in mainland China were once empty after the previous boycott of the internationally renowned brand H&M. But H&M offered a “30% off” campaign on March 27, and people flocked to H&M to snap up all kinds of clothing.
The same phenomenon occurred with the boycotted Nike shoes, and on March 26, a screenshot went viral on Weibo. The picture shows that the “second kill” app “poly good grab”, which covers all e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall and Jingdong, opened a Nike women’s shoes for purchase at 8pm that night. Before the start of the robbery, there were already 337,000 people who made reservations, and once the time came, all the stock was sold out almost in a second.
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