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Coach’s New York headquarters was the site of a surprise sensory onslaught on Thursday morning, 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” until two protesters were handcuffed and 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.”
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?”
The 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. Learn more about how you can take part in Free the Animals Friday:
Cows have friends, hold grudges against other cows, and mourn when a loved one dies or they’re separated. They—like all animals—are someone,not something. The leather industry also contributes to climate catastrophe, land devastation, deforestation, pollution, water contamination, and biodiversity loss.
Join us in urging Coach to drop leather:
