Lady Business: Democrats and Republicans, tampons and blue jeans; Jagged Little Lack of Imagination

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 93rd issue, published
Feb 23, 2020.

Partisan Products

If you watched the umpteenth Democratic presidential debate this past week, you might have heard Mayor Pete declare, yet again, that he’s not a millionaire. (Yet.) And you probably saw Elizabeth Warren making sure that no one can continue to ignore the well-documented similarities between how Michael Bloomberg and the current president treat women.
 
(Also, “maybe they didn’t like a joke I told” is just such a typical response by men called on bad behavior. Because it’s effective! Subtly undermining and gaslighting at the same time: “Oh, you poor, naïve, uptight lady. You were dumb enough to take that [whatever offensive remark] seriously?”)
 
I spent some of the week working on a story about politics from a different angle: What happens when a company finds itself thrust into a partisan or controversial situation, because of where it took funding?
 
This is an area I’ve covered a lot in the past couple of years, especially as it regards Saudi Arabia and all the American businesses enmeshed with its rather problematic government. This week I covered a more domestic kerfuffle: the fallout of the Equinox/SoulCycle boycott this summer, when news broke that investor (and Miami Dolphins owner) Stephen Ross was hosting a glitzy Hamptons fundraiser for President Trump. One of the Ross-backed companies that was mentioned but not really covered at the time was Lola, a direct-to-consumer startup that sells organic tampons and other menstrual products along with a general pro-women vibe:
 

It's a growing company that now finds itself trying to thread an increasingly tiny needle: advocating “for all women” and for certain legislation that affects these customers—without getting involved in the partisan fighting that often revolves around women and the policies affecting their bodies.
 
Some high-profile female-focused companies, including Glossier, M.M. LaFleur, and The Wing, have to some extent given up on making it through the eye of that needle, especially regarding the highly politicized fight over reproductive rights. The women who founded those startups—as well as hundreds of other male and female executives, at all sorts of companies—last summer signed a petition supporting access to abortion.
 
But the traditional business desire to shy away from such debates, or any resulting partisan label, is not necessarily a surprising one for a consumer startup looking for broad appeal. After all, women of all political affiliations buy tampons: “You'd be surprised by how many customers we have who are conservative,” [Lola co-founder Jordana] Kier says.
 
As Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, puts it: "One of the things that I don’t think would serve society well is if we have companies that only want to serve Democrats or Republicans."

 
Yet those companies are increasingly being created, by their leaders’ personal or corporate political stances, and by how consumers inevitably react. Patagonia has gone beyond advocating against climate change to endorsing Democratic candidates. My hometown craft-ish beer, Yeungling, endorsed Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhat less intentionally, there’s the ridiculous-sounding-but-real denim divide between “red jeans or blue”:
 

Consumer research data show Democrats have become more likely to wear Levi’s than their Republican counterparts. The opposite is true with Wrangler, which is now far more popular with Republicans.
 
There is no simple explanation behind those consumer moves. Some of it is due to social and political stances companies are taking, such as Levi’s embrace of gun control. Some is tied to larger geographic shifts in the political parties themselves, as rural counties become more Republican and urban areas lean more Democratic. Wrangler is popular in the cowboy counties of the West and Midwest while San Francisco-based Levi’s resonates more with city dwellers.

 
This Wall Street Journal feature from November uses the Levi’s/Wrangler dichotomy to examine the increasing partisan divide for consumers, whether or not the companies behind them are explicitly trying to appeal to certain subsets of shoppers. Some of the findings seem obvious: Shockingly, Fox News has become much more appealing to Republicans in the past decade, while Levi’s stances on gun control and immigration have bumped up its appeal to Democrats. Others affiliations are more subtle: Apparently Arby’s consumers have become more conservative, while “brands of hard liquor, such as Chivas Regal and Courvoisier, and wine … grew more Democratic as they became more popular with younger drinkers.”
 
So as the 2020 presidential campaign continues its years-long march towards November, it seems inevitable for most businesses to continue falling into this partisan gap between their customers. No matter how apolitical shopping for jeans, or booze, or menstrual products has been in the past -- or how apolitical these businesses still might want it to be.

Jagged Little Props

 
Speaking of politics seeping into everything, I saw the Jagged Little Pill musical on Broadway this weekend. The performances, especially the lead women, were great, and some of the staging was inspired, especially one scene performed as a song-long rewind of the previous scene. And as a woman who in my teenage years bought Alanis Morrissette’s debut album on CD in a Borders, I am legally required to love the music. (Which I do!)

A lot has been written about the all-over-the-place wokeness of the musical’s story, which didn’t entirely work for me, but I think my biggest criticism might be the set design. I just kept on wondering how much money the producers must have spent on all the fussy props that were used for just one scene: church pews, subway benches, SoulCycle bikes, aisles of grocery-store shelves, metal high school desks, and so many overexplained protest posters….

It was a far cry from the aesthetic of the last couple of Broadway musicals I’ve loved; Hadestown and Come From Away both more or less left the actors with wooden chairs and high expectations of the audience’s imagination. Which is not to say that every Broadway blockbuster needs to embrace that same minimalist aesthetic! But there was something distracting about all the stuff that Jagged Little Pill felt the need to put onstage, instead of focusing on its actors, its stories, and the music that so many women of my generation will be thrilled to pay to relive.
 
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