inspiring companies | My Non Leather Life

Super Cool Vegan Shoes from Marais USA– Doesn’t Get Much More Cool Than This

April 26th, 2011

For my first post back in the blogosphere, I would like to introduce you to some really cool vegan shoes. And I do mean cool. This company is probably the epitome of Brooklyn hipster chic.

Marais USA has very good styles, and a lot of them happen to be vegan. This company was founded by two young girls of just about my age. Very inspiring.

They have recently launched their summer collection of shoes and there are some great non leather options– yay.

Here are my favorites:

My first pick are these leopard Dolce Vita-esque slingbacks.

Slingback Flat Leopard

These remind me of something an Italian woman on the back of a motorino in Roma would wear.

Agree?

Another favorite style of mine is their Loafer Heel:

Loafer Heel Camel

I feel this is really the perfect interview shoe. Especially in Black.

Loafer Heel Black

It doesn’t get much hipper than this!!

Lastly, I have a pair of Marais USA’s brown Chelsea Boots, and they are my favorite pair of shoes. I wore them all winter long, and they are looking very scuffed and part of the heels have worn down. These are really good shoes, and I get lots of compliments on them. I wish I had a pair in black as well.

Chelsea Boot Black

Overall, Marais is a great company, but I’ve always been a little disappointed that while style and affordability are part of their mission, making cruelty free shoes is not. Some of their shoes are vegan, but some of the best and coolest ones are not. Why not just make it a priority to make them all non leather? I don’t understand.

However, I admire the founders of this company, and they make great looking shoes. Since Marais has a pretty big selection of shoes, and many of them are vegan, I will be adding them to my article Where To Find Cool Vegan Shoes at the top of the website.

So…

What do you think of these shoes? Are you into them? Please, let me know…I love to hear your comments!

Update:

Here is a complete list of the vegan shoes from Marais USA confirmed by Marais themselves.

2 comments

I’m Back.

January 27th, 2011

A new comment has made me spring back to life.

A commenter Rebekah wrote:

Blogging is HARD. All the research and fiddling with technical details, and sometime no one comments at all. But you CAN make a difference, and you ARE.

Yay. That is so sweet. Some comments of late have made me realize that people are still looking and failing to find vegan shoes, and as Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA says, ONE can make a difference (that’s the name of a book she wrote). So with that in mind, I am going to update you all on some good new vegan shoes that have become available, while I’ve been Out Of Commission.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Forever 21 is the BEST source for cool vegan shoes on the web. Unfortunately they are what I call “unintentionally vegan” because they do not have animals interests at the forefront and are not a vegan company, however they have great styles and I almost never see leather used in any of their shoes. When there is leather in a shoe it is marked in the title as Leather or Suede, as far as I know. I saw 2 shoes out of hundreds that were real leather. I think this is mostly in the interest of keeping their costs low though, as opposed to some sort of awareness of the Leather Industry, but at least it means all their shoes are extremely cheap.

If only Forever 21 were a vegan shoe company, vegans would have a great resource for affordable, cool vegan shoes but at the same time, they’d know their money was supporting a company with the interests of animals in mind. Maybe this fantasy company could even work towards educating people about the leather industry and giving part of their money to animal rights causes.

Well, here are the shoes.

I will simply post some photos of the shoes I like with links to their page on Forever 21.

Tell me what you think of the shoes/ this post in the comments as I LOVE to hear from commenters. I’d love to know, what would your ideal vegan shoe company look like?