Original article:
Business in Vancouver December 4-10, 2007; issue 945
Fur flying new green flag
Pappas expands to Richmond as growing Canadian fur industry opts for public image makeover
Glen Korstrom
The Fur Council of Canada is out to convince consumers that the $1.5 billion North American fur industry is environmentally sustainable and that fur is an eco-friendly material, not a cruelly obtained skin.
Green buzzwords - such as "sustainable," "renewable," "biodegradable" and "non-toxic" - are sprinkled throughout the council's website, advertising and billboards as part of a $1 million marketing campaign launched last week.
The campaign has drawn the predictable derision from animal rights groups, but marketing experts say it's backed by persuasive arguments.
"They're using part of an encirclement attack, which is what we teach," said Lindsay Meredith, a Simon Fraser University marketing professor.
Strong challengers use encirclement attacks to compete with market leaders. In this case, the fur council's frontal assault is aimed squarely at the high-profile anti-fur lobby.
"What they have to do now is overcome the major attack point," Meredith said. "That's the issue of how wild animals are trapped and handled. For farmed animals, their positioning is not bad. They've got to treat this simply as, 'Hey, look, don't get two-faced about this. You guys eat cows every day so there's no difference. Your shoes are made of leather so back off.'"
The anti-fur lobby has achieved prominence from its own public awareness campaigns. Its mid-1990s "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaign featured naked supermodels on billboards. Members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have similarly drawn attention by throwing red paint at fur-wearing fashion models on catwalks.
"We think it's the responsibility of the industry to explain our own story," Fur Council of Canada executive vice-president Alan Herscovici told Business in Vancouver. "Consumers who wear fur have a right to know that it's an environmentally sustainable industry. We're supporting the people on the land."
Herscovici said that seldom-used leg-hold traps have improved over the years so that they hold the animal in place without cutting into flesh. They're no longer the steel-jawed devices that still appear on the posters of anti-fur lobby groups.
"Nature is not Disneyland. Wildlife dies in nature," Herscovici said. "For example, 80% of young muskrats don't make it through their first winter. Each species produces many more young each year than the habitat can support. This is the principle of sustainable use."
The fur council's campaign comes from a position of strength. Canadian fur exports grew 25% to $450.1 million in 2006 from $360.6 million in 2005.
Locally, that strength is clear from Pappas Furs' expansion in June to Richmond's Aberdeen Centre.
Pappas' president Constantine Pappas said his 700-square-foot Richmond store has done a brisk business and can be supplied with corporately designed garments from the company's 24,000-square-foot, four-storey Yaletown headquarters. That facility includes a 6,000-square-foot retail store, as well as space for designing, manufacturing and reselling raw fur.
Pappas would not reveal annual revenue, but he said his company is the world's largest fully vertically integrated fur company.
This is despite a bit of a setback at the turn of the century. Pappas opened a second store at the corner of Howe and Hastings streets in 1999. He closed the outlet in 2002.
"In 2003, we started to see a turnaround in people's attitudes toward fur," Pappas said. "In 2005/2006 we started to get a lot of young people. That's something that we hadn't seen for 10 to 15 years. The business has been growing since 2004."
But Peter Hamilton, who founded Vancouver's Lifeforce Foundation, believes fur retailers have blood on their hands.
He recently visited Lower Mainland fur farms and was quickly shown the door after he started snapping photos of animals in cramped cages.
"If the fur council says fur farming is ecologically friendly, they should allow people to take photographs and especially see the slaughter methods," said Hamilton, who doesn't eat meat or wear leather.
"There could be 50,000 mink on one farm. There's no way to be able to kill them all painlessly and instantly." .
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