Fashion Without Cruelty is an independent ratings site for animal-free fashion, run by two founders in London. We check what brands say against what they sell, and we publish our working.
Why this site exists
“Vegan” is one of the easiest words in fashion to print and one of the least checked. In a single week of research this September we found three brands commonly listed as vegan with wool or leather in their current ranges, and one we had rated ourselves. A label on a product tells you about that product. It rarely tells you what the rest of the brand sells, who made the glue, or whether anyone has looked.
So we look. Every brand here is measured against the same published standard, from evidence we can point to, with the date we checked it. Today that covers 30 brands, 10 of them carrying a red tag.
The people
Fashion Without Cruelty is a joint venture between Philip Porter and Kimberly Bascoulergue. Between them they have spent more than a decade building websites for small businesses, which is mostly a training in reading claims carefully.
Philip Porter
Co-founder: the standard, the ratings and the build
Phil has spent more than seven years building WordPress, WooCommerce and ecommerce sites. He runs Shop Startup and Liberty Web, his product studio, and co-founded the London founders’ community NODE. He studied Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, which is why the standard is written to be read, not just applied. At Fashion Without Cruelty he looks after the rubric, the desk research behind each rating, and the site and rating engine that publish them.
Kimberly is a strategic web designer in Kingston upon Thames who builds websites for founders and independent businesses. She came to design through film production and marketing. She holds an MSc in Marketing and Brand Management from Oxford Brookes and has worked in marketing at Digital Catapult and AVEVA. At Fashion Without Cruelty she leads design and brand: how the ratings look, how they read, and how they reach the people who need them.
Two gates come first. A brand that sells any animal-derived material, or tests on animals, carries a red tag and a score below zero: we list it so you know before you click, and any animal-free piece from it loses 50 points for the brand it funds. A brand that clears both gates is scored out of 100 on the evidence it publishes and the evidence it gives us.
We start with desk research, whether or not a brand has asked us to. That means product pages, policies, reports and the registers of the schemes a brand says it belongs to. A claim we cannot check earns nothing. Every brand page lists its sources and the date we read them, and every brand is sent its assessment with the chance to reply, which we publish. The Good badge needs 85 points, both gates clear and a completed evidence audit. No brand holds it yet.
How we are paid
Two ways, both disclosed. Some links to shops earn us a commission, which never changes a rating (our affiliate disclosure sets out exactly how). Brands that clear both gates can pay for verification: an annual licence of £250, £600 or £1,200, depending on size, which pays for the audit and not for the result. A brand that fails the audit keeps its published score, and a red brand cannot buy verification at all.
Challenge a rating
If you are a brand and we have you wrong, or a shopper with evidence we have missed, write to hello@fashionwithoutcruelty.co.uk with the brand and the evidence. We reply within ten working days. Where we were wrong we correct the rating, say so on the brand’s page, and add it to the log below.
Corrections log
Every change to a published rating or to the rules, newest first.
ThoughtChanged from clear of both gates to a red tag. A re-check found wool in its current range: a 100% wool mitten, wool-blend hats and a wool sock range. Its bamboo scarf now scores −30 and the brand −80.
Recycled animal fibresOur materials check no longer treats “recycled” as meaning “not the real thing”. Recycled wool, cashmere or leather is still wool, cashmere or leather, and now fails the materials gate as the virgin material does.
The Standard, version 2.1Brands that sell animal-derived materials are now listed with a red tag and a score below zero, rather than with no score at all. Veja, Stella McCartney and Gini London moved to red tags under this change.
