The income of the chain’s lingerie stores has been stable the last two weeks; nothing has changed,” said Zunaid Razack, merchandise manager of women’s lingerie shops at Fawaz Alhokair Group, which owns Debenhams, La Senza, La vie en Rose and other stores.
Other lingerie shop managers that didn’t want to be named also said the boycott had no effect on their sales. Some of them weren’t aware of the boycott.
Earlier this month a group of Saudi women, led by Reem Assad, a columnist and lecturer at the private Dar Al-Hekma Women’s College, called for the two week boycott to raise awareness of the issue.
In 2005 the Labor Ministry asked lingerie shops to start planning to replace foreign male sales clerks with women.
The ministerial decision stipulated that all lingerie shops in the Kingdom must employ only Saudi women within a year while shops selling women’s clothing have two years to comply with the decision. Most lingerie shops have ignored the call.
Arab News asked Asaad why she thought the boycott was not working. “People’s reactions to social causes is weak in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “I’m halfway to my goal if I raise awareness on the importance of public solidarity and women’s economic rights.”
Asaad wanted to respond to a report on the issue published in Arab News on Sunday. She said her group was not asking for lingerie shops to be turned into women-only stores.  “I recognize the right of men to want to shop in these stores with their wives,” she said. “So I ask the big companies to feminize the staff, not the shops.”
Arab News ran a report on lingerie shop Nayomi’s experiment with women-only shops.
Sarah bin Sahal, Nayomi area manager, said women-only shops are not as popular as shops that allow men and women customers inside. The chain has recently begun using women sales clerks at two stores in Jeddah that allow customers of both genders to enter.
Razack, of the Fawaz Alhokair Group, said his company was planning to hire women sales clerks for its lingerie shops in the near future.