“Hey Sbri, I love this purse - but can you make it in vegan leather?” – is a question that lands in our inbox from time to time. We’re a leather accessories brand with a sustainable focus, offering beautifully handmade colourful personalised bags and purses (and more!) that aim to make a big impact on your mood but a small one on the planet. From our materials to our production methods, packaging and beyond, we consider our environmental footprint at every step and try to run our small business in the most sustainable way we can. 

So why don’t Sbri offer a vegan alternative to leather, when the vegan lifestyle is so heavily associated with sustainability? It’s a big topic, one that we’ve already covered in this blog post asking how sustainable is leather, and this blog post debunking 5 myths about sustainable fashion. In today’s post we wanted to break it down a bit more and share three reasons why we don’t currently work with vegan leather at Sbri. We’re going to discuss whether vegan leather is good for the planet, whether vegan leather is sustainable and why we’re dubious of the term “vegan” to describe it at all. Let’s get into it…

If you’ve ever shopped at Sbri, followed @sbri_studio or just happened upon our website in a magic twist of fate, chances are you’ve heard us chat about the ‘S’ word a fair bit, the ‘S’ word being sustainability. Being a sustainable leather brand was never a question for us, we knew that if we were going to be making fun leather accessories it had to be fun and fair for everyone, including our planet (cos we’ve only got one). You can read all about our sustainability practices here, including information about the natural materials we use and how we run our leather studio. 

As well as offering our customers gorgeous, UK made personalised purses and accessories we try to encourage them to learn about what’s in their new garment, how it was made, where and by who - important questions we should all be asking every time we shop. We know that shopping sustainably in day-to-day life can be overwhelming and it’s almost impossible to do it perfectly, but we’d love for it to become more accessible. In this post we’re going to try and debunk 5 common assumptions and misconceptions about sustainable fashion so that you can hopefully start to think about it in a different way.

Who you gonna call? Myth busters.

At Sbri we put sustainability first. It’s always been a huge priority for us and it’s not something we’re willing to compromise on. We’re a leather accessories company that do things differently – from the vegetable tanned leather we use, to the way our products are made and packaged, and the energy used to power our studio.

All our leather is sustainably sourced in the UK and our personalised accessories are made to order in our studio to avoid overproduction and minimise our carbon footprint. But is this the case for the whole leather goods industry? Absolutely not.