Annick Ireland founded the vegan marketplace Immaculate Vegan after struggling to find stylish vegan fashion. Now, the platform counts hundreds of brands.
Being vegan is becoming easier and easier, but when it comes to vegan fashion, finding brands that are vegan, ethical, sustainable and stylish can still be tricky – if you don’t know where to look.
Annick Ireland founded the vegan and sustainable marketplace Immaculate Vegan after going plant-based herself and struggling to find brands that were aligned with her principle as well as her style. In this episode of Pretty Good Business, we talk about transforming a lifestyle choice in a business and the importance of building a community, even before building the business.
Can you tell us more about Immaculate Vegan?
We describe ourselves as the world’s premier online ethical and sustainable fashion destination. We are a marketplace with a large number of brands (we have around 130), primarily in fashion, but we also sell beauty and lifestyle homewares.
We try to make sure we’ve got a good number of brands in all the different regions around the world – Europe and North America being our focus. Essentially you buy from us, but the brands will send you the product themselves directly.
This way of working enables us to reduce packaging and shipping costs, because we’re not managing a massive warehouse and having to have everything sent to us and then send it out again. It also means that we can have a really large number of brands on our platform.
What pushed you to start your business?
The starting point was when I became vegan. I found the food side really easy, particularly living in London, but what I did find hard at the beginning was fashion. I started looking up online for vegan shoes, bags, and it was a bit disheartening, because things looked really practical, very chunky, but not very stylish or sophisticated.
Then I went on to Instagram and I started to find so many really amazing vegan brands but they were mostly very small and not brilliant at marketing themselves or getting a lot of exposure. So I started an Instagram blog called Immaculate Vegan. The idea was for me to curate and share the best of what I was finding to show people that you can be vegan, or just shop more ethically and sustainably, and still buy things that look beautiful and are high-quality.
The natural next step was to start a marketplace because there wasn’t anything like us at the time. I met my co-founder Simon through mutual friends and we launched just over a year ago.
What was the process like and where did you start from?
My background is marketing so I was aware of all of the key marketing aspects of running the business. Although, I’ve worked primarily in business marketing, rather than consumer marketing so that that’s certainly different. My co-founder, Simon comes from a very digital marketing background. So building the business was very familiar, but neither of us had ever run a fashion business before so that was definitely new.
The way we went about it was quite organic because I already had a community on Instagram. I already had a good understanding of what the ethical and sustainable fashion landscape looked like.
Do you think that having the community before and being in contact with so many like-minded people helped when you launched it?
Hugely! It would have been really hard to get all those brands involved, to sign contracts with us, to agree to our terms, commissions and all that kind of stuff, if they didn’t already have something to believe in.
What did you learn during the process of building a sustainable and vegan business?
Lots, but that’s just true of any business. I learned that technology is your best friend and your worst enemy at the same time and the importance of a good team.
So you do think that people are embracing sustainability more now that they have more time to think?
I think so, yes. I think previously people were aware of the climate crisis but now they really understand how that same crisis can also lead to a public health problem.
So how do you see the future of your company after COVID?
We’re 100% online business and being a marketplace based on drop-shipping really helps as well, because we’re not reliant on big warehouses with lots of people working in them to ship our products. And about 95% of our brands, because they’re small businesses, were able to keep going through the pandemic.
For us to now take it to the next stage, it’s fundraising and getting some help to really put a lot more money into marketing, PR, all the things that help us reach all those really important audiences for us.
What is the best thing that you have on Immaculate Vegan?
I do genuinely love all our brands so it’s not excluding anyone but what I would say is that right right now there’s a new Italian brand that we just brought on called Yatai. They make the most beautiful plant-based leather sneakers. Sustainable, beautiful, very classic designs that are never going to go out of fashion, which is the kind of fashion I love because I think it’s all about being able to just wear things until they wear out.
What’s the achievement you’re the most proud of?
We’re a year that has been very hard for everyone, and we’ve managed to grow – we’ve pretty much hit all our targets. We’re really delighted about that, because it shows that people like what we’re doing.
If you had to give one piece of advice to a business owner, what would it be? Is there anything that you wish you knew when you started?
One thing that I did know, but I think it’s good advice, would be to build a market before you build a product. So build an audience first, iIt really helps you when you start.
