In a world where conscious consumption is more than a passing trend, few voices resonate as strongly as Annick Ireland’s. As the CEO and Founder of Immaculate Vegan, she has created a platform that elevates ethical fashion—curating high-quality, beautifully designed pieces that marry style with sustainability. We spoke with Annick about her path to launching Immaculate Vegan, the values driving the brand, and her vision for the future of responsible retail.
What inspired the launch of Immaculate Vegan?
I had been a pescatarian for a while, but in 2014 I adopted a greyhound from the Retired Greyhound Trust (a lovely girl we called Tippi), and that enabled me to make the link between the pets we love and all animals. Rescue animals are often quite scared and vulnerable due to previous trauma in their lives, and this is particularly true of racing greyhounds, who usually don’t stop racing until around 5 years old.
Connecting with my dog and seeing how she reacted to situations (many of which scared the living daylights out of her) helped me develop an empathy with animals I hadn’t really had before, and imagine how they might experience the world – and want to make it as trauma-free as possible. I was also pretty convinced about the health and environmental benefits of going vegan, but they were just the icing on the cake for me.
It was when I became vegan that I started looking for vegan alternatives in fashion, starting with non leather bags and shoes. I actually found switching to vegan food pretty easy, but fashion was much harder!
After a lot of time spent researching brands on the internet and social media, I discovered that there were a whole bunch of fashion-forward vegan brands out there – but they were really hard to find. So I started Immaculate Vegan as an Instagram blog in order to curate and share the very best vegan fashion I could find, to help others looking for ethical and sustainable alternatives that were also beautiful, well made and high quality. I wanted to elevate the profile of vegan fashion and show people that you can absolutely be vegan and be stylish too! Developing this into a retail platform was a natural next step.
How Immaculate Vegan selects ethical fashion brands?
We spend a lot of time researching new brands that are launching in the sustainable and ethical fashion space, and we also get a lot of brands approaching us now too. Essentially, we’re looking for brands that share our values. We set high standards, and every product we sell has to pass our test of both aesthetics and ethics. We look for products that are beautifully designed and well made (and we get a sample of a product from every brand we sell to test this), and we also ask all our brands to go through a questionnaire that asks the following questions in some detail:
Materials – are you using 100% vegan materials, and also the most sustainable materials possible? For example, organic cotton, linen, hemp, Tencel, bamboo silk, plastic-free buttons, organic plant-based dyes. Are your vegan leathers PVC free and ideally either bio-based or using recycled materials? You don’t need to be a vegan brand, but you do need to demonstrate to us that the products you want to sell through our store are 100% vegan and cruelty-free.
Manufacturing – is your brand using the most sustainable manufacturing processes it can, e.g. working with factories that use close loop technology, solar power, strict controls on emissions and any release of dyes, minimal water usage? There are many different components to sustainable manufacturing, but we need to see evidence of how you're trying to be sustainable here.
Ethical labour – do you work with your suppliers to ensure your workers are paid a living wage, are treated fairly and ethically, work in a safe and hygienic environment? If you use factories, do they have any fair / ethical labour accreditations?
Packaging – do you use the most sustainable packaging available, e.g. recycled, recyclable, zero waste, or plastic free?
Annick Ireland, CEO & Founder, Immaculate Vegan
How do you engage and build a community of customers who are passionate about sustainability?
It’s a combination of making sure we really are selling the best vegan brands in the world, that meet our high standards of ethics, sustainability, design and quality – and giving our customers a great choice (which builds trust); and inspiring them with content that helps them get excited about (and navigate) the world of ethical consumption, which we do through The Immaculate Magazine. We publish at least one new article every week, and this now has hundreds of original articles on topics from all the incredible new vegan leathers, to Best Of lists for each season, to Behind The Brand features which help them discover amazing new brands.
As a founder, what has been your most rewarding experience with Immaculate Vegan?
I think I'd answer that using a couple of quotes. The first is very early feedback from a customer, and this (and subsequently others like it) showed us that we were really valued by people who had been desperately seeking what we were offering for some time, but just couldn't get it before. "How amazing to finally find a decent ethically aware website where you can order high quality items with a touch of class by all the best brands! Everything I have ordered from this company has been even better than I expected and I wouldn’t hesitate to use them again and again! Fabulous stuff Immaculate Vegan..keep it up!" We now have many hundreds of wonderful customer testimonials on Trustpilot, along with a 4.6/5 rating, and when things get tough,I just remind myself of some of these. And the second quote is from Sophie Cornish who co-founded (and successfully sold) the incredible marketplace Not On The High Street – this meant a lot to us because she's a guru in this space and it felt like a great validation! When coming into a recent investment round, she emailed us to say "I'm a big fan of Immaculate Vegan. I think I know a little of the challenges attached to building a marketplace business, and you're clearly rising to it beautifully".
What advice would you give to consumers who want to make more sustainable choices in their shopping habits?
I think firstly educate yourself about what sustainability and ethics mean in fashion – we have a lot of content in our magazine that can help with this, from What Is Vegan Leather Made Of – And Is It Sustainable? To Ethical Fashion Mistakes You're Probably Making. That can help you identify what to focus on, and common pitfalls to avoid. And then start by making swaps every time you need something new (there’s no need to throw away what you already have – just wear it out if you still love it). At Immaculate Vegan we tend to focus on classic pieces that stand the test of time and trends, and that really helps with sustainability too, as it’s about investing in higher quality items that will wear well so you don't have to keep replacing them. Lastly – remember that fashion is fun too, and being ethical and sustainable doesn’t mean being boring. There’s so much choice out there now that you should be able to find products and brands that meet your personal style.
Are there any exciting plans or upcoming projects in the pipeline for Immaculate Vegan that you can share with us? We’d love to hear about what’s next for you!
We started with vegan women’s shoes and bags, so this is the area we are strongest in, but we’re now really expanding our clothing categories too. We will also grow our men’s offering, which there’s a lot of demand for, and we have recently launched Immaculate Kids and Immaculate Pets too.
Ultimately we want to make sure we have a strong offering in every key category in every region around the world, so that customers have a great choice of vegan and sustainable products that they can also buy locally.
ASK Scandinavia available at Immaculate Vegan website