Coach Stores to Face International Protests on Black Friday Over Skin Sales
For Immediate Release:
November 26, 2025
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
On the busiest shopping day of the year, holiday crowds from Los Angeles to London will be met with realistic severed “cow’s heads,” humans being “skinned alive,” and other provocative displays as PETA supporters descend on Coach stores around the world to call out the brand’s rampant, reckless use of animal- and planet-killing leather.
The transatlantic tumult will mark PETA’s second annual “Free the Animals” Friday, an international Black Friday initiative that calls attention to the annual slaughter of more than a billion animals worldwide for their skins and hopes to inspire consumers to refuse to swipe their card for anything made of leather—aka “the new fur.”
“Every bit of leather was sliced off the body of an animal who endured a lifetime of misery and, just like fur, it is someone’s skin and belongs in the history books, not on store shelves,” says PETA President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on Coach and all holiday shoppers to reject the inherent cruelty and environmental destruction of leather and embrace vegan materials that no one was killed for.”
Cows have friends, hold grudges against other cows, and mourn when a loved one dies or when they’re separated from each other. At slaughterhouses, cows may be skinned and dismembered while they’re still conscious—after they endure castration, tail-docking, and dehorning, often without any painkillers, on farms. A PETA exposé of the world’s largest leather processor—which has supplied Coach—showed that workers brand calves on the face, beat cows and bulls, and shock them with electric prods.
In addition to the horrific cruelty it inflicts on animals, the leather industry also contributes to the climate catastrophe, pollution, and water contamination—and a recent investigation linked Coach’s leather supply chain to illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. While many top designers are now meeting the demand for eco-friendly fashion with sustainable vegan leather, Coach remains an outlier—and is attempting to dupe conscientious consumers by marketing ground-up leather scraps as “sustainable.”
PETA will hold Free the Animals Friday events around the world—including in New York, New York; Miami, Florida; Detroit, Michigan; London, England; and more.
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.
