Forward Fashion
For most of us, finding plant-based options is only getting easier. But what about vegan fashion? Enter Annick Ireland and Simon Bell, cofounders of online marketplace Immaculate Vegan; a startup focussed on creating an accessible platform for ethical and sustainable brands. In this week’s episode, we chat with the pair about the founding story, as well as their proposition and wide-range of unique products. We also discuss the criteria for onboarding a brand, promising vegan fashion alternatives, challenges in the journey, and their advice for anybody sitting on the fence about starting their own site.
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The story of vegan alternatives and their accessibility is one familiar to most of us within the plant-based community. Immaculate vegan cofounder Annick Ireland became vegan 5 years ago and found the food side easy, but other things such as fashion were much more difficult.
Annick: “I just became really disheartened by what I saw.”
As a result, she took to the web and spent time researching brands on Instagram. Contrary to what she thought there were a number of vegan high-end brands, they just weren’t easy to find.
Annick: “I didn’t want people to be put off trying to choose vegan fashion … by thinking there aren’t the brands out there.”
Spreading awareness, the idea of Immaculate Vegan was born, but rather than starting out as a marketplace, it first took the form of an Instagram blog where Annick was sharing what she found with other people in the community. Her audience was responding positively and sustainable brands were messaging, expressing their desire to get involved.
Annick: “The idea was to challenge those stereotypes around vegan fashion; you can look immaculate and you can also be immaculate in terms of having a much lower impact on the environment.”
Annick: “It was really clear to me that there was a big gap in the market and that something needed to happen to bring people who wanted to buy this stuff and people who were selling this amazing stuff together … and at the time there wasn’t anyone doing that.”
A friend introduced her to Simon Bell who has a background in e-commerce, and soon enough the brand as an online marketplace was born. Currently spanning 120 brands, the platform provides options on everything from vegan bags and boots, to beauty and homeware products.
Simon: “Our proposition is wide-ranging; our proposition is the finest ethical fashion which covers a large number of categories.”
Annick: “I think it’s also just about making it easy for people; one thing that could be a barrier to buying more ethically and sustainably is just thinking it’s going to be difficult.”
Annick: “We do have a blog, we give a lot of information to people as well on how they can choose, but the idea is if you can buy your bag and your shoes and your wallet and your watch and all your beauty products and lovely non-wool blankets for your home… if you can buy that all in one place, that just makes things easy for people, and hopefully more people will do that.”
But, despite the fact that Immaculate Vegan is a platform for multiple brands, there are a number of criteria that businesses need to meet before coming on board.
Annick: “We really position ourselves as a sustainable as well as ethical marketplace, and that means we look at the whole supply chain.”
These criteria are positioned around 4 main areas:
People: Asking the question of who are products made by, where are they made and under what conditions?
Materials: Finding the most environmentally sustainable materials
Manufacturing: How does that brand manufacture their products, and how are they trying to do this in the most sustainable way?
Packaging: Are they plastic-free, or is the packaging recycled or recyclable?
Annick: “We don’t do any shipping ourselves; we’re a drop-shipping market place which basically means that we do everything up until the point of delivery.”
Annick: “One of the reasons we do this is we think it’s the most sustainable method; the alternative would be brands send us loads of products, we have a big warehouse, we then have to re-ship those out to the customer who orders them. By doing this direct from the brand, that cuts out a whole lot of freight, emissions and carbon resources.”
Seeing such a large number of vegan materials come through, we were curious to hear about what current leather alternatives are currently standing out in the market and why.
Annick: “I really like apple leather which is on the one hand is great because it’s using 50% apple waste which is from the commercial juicing industry … like a lot of vegan leathers it does contain some amount of polyurethane … which is a plastic, but it’s a much less environmentally impactful plastic and it’s still much better than animal leather.”
Annick: “I think a really important thing vegan leathers need to be aware of is that they need to be as durable as leather, and obviously they’re trying to achieve that while not going through leather tanning process which is really toxic but is also what makes leather durable.”
Annick: “Cactus leather is also really great.”
Annick: “One feature that cactus leather has, that a lot of vegan leathers have over animal leather, is that they’re water-resistant.”
Annick also spoke about bio-leathers and their use by high-end designers such as Stella McCartney.
Simon: What gets us excited is that it’s a new, innovative sector where lots of brands and companies are starting to produce very effective alternatives to leather from a whole range of different raw materials.”
We also discussed some of the similarities between the fashion and food sector; I was curious to hear about whether or not the pair saw any major bottlenecks that needed to be broken through, similar to the obstacle of nutrient media or cost when it comes to the alternative protein sector.
Simon: “There’s plenty of challenges … we’ve got a lot of moving parts and a lot of dependencies over 120 different brands … but bottlenecks? No, I don’t think so. We are facing challenges with the every-changing tax requirements put on marketplaces post-Brexit.”
Annick went on to talk about the disconnection still evident in major brands, giving the example of Hermes introducing a mushroom leather bag, that also contained calf leather.
Annick: “I think this shows how big brands are getting wrong; they see there’s a big trend of consumers really wanting different materials, but they’re not really understanding why.”
That being said, there has been a large amount of traction of vegan, ethical and environmentally-friendly fashion brands amongst the mainstream, and global platforms such as Immaculate Vegan have an important role to play in onboarding new businesses and growing the online awareness around them.
Annick: “I think what’s really interesting about the vegan food movement is that it’s being driven by non-vegans … and that’s great!”
Annick: “I think the same sort of pattern we’re seeing in fashion, so it’s people that are just hearing more about leather and feeling uncomfortable about it and thinking about the environmental impacts of wool … and they’re seeing these really nice alternatives.”
Annick: “I think what brands like about us … is the fact that we really take a lot of pains and take a lot of effort into the design and look of the immaculate vegan brand and so we are selling premium brands.”
Annick: “There were … sustainable marketplaces, but they didn’t really look that appealing to the consumer and we all know that if you want to get people to change how they buy fashion … you’ve got to have something that looks really desirable.” (26:00)
The same can be said with raising awareness to consumers and growing an audience, which has no doubt brought challenges.
Simon: “Our first challenge is money, it’s been self-funded until recently; we’ve now been through a very successful first round of financing.”
Simon: “When you don’t have money you have to be clever about how you do your marketing, so up until now we’ve done it through Instagram but also we’ve done a lot of work in search and organic natural SEO … to make sure that we’re found for key terms people are looking for.”
Annick: “I think we’re lucky that we have a lot of loyal customers, but it’s true that a lot of our customers are vegan … they’re going to find us because these are the people that are desperately trying to find nice items … but that next stage … you do need the funding to do the paid marketing to get to the wider audience.”
The pair’s advice for anybody looking to start their own e-commerce site?
Simon: “You can’t rely on purpose and passion alone, you need to have a strong commercial proposition, and it has to be different… the same rules of the market apply.”
Annick: “I think it does massively help if you have a cofounder; I know not everyone can necessarily be in that position but I think even if you just have some people that you work really closely … that can help motivate you, help you solve problems, that can share the lows as well as the highs … I think it does really help having someone to do it with.”
To learn more and support Annick and Simon, you can head to Immaculate Vegan’s website, or check out their business on social media.