Vegan Sneakers
Nowadays, vegans and the vegan-curious can choose from a wide variety of vegan sneakers, as it seems that this specific market is constantly growing. However, it is important to verify that although vegan fashion brands have a positive impact on animal welfare, more attention should be paid to the quality of materials and the working conditions of their staff.
As a matter of fact, many fast fashion brands offer cheap vegan collections, but most of the times those shoes have not been created to last, turning into fashion waste after a few weeks. Moreover, critics contend the poor working conditions in the production facilities belonging to fast fashion multinationals.
On the other side, there is a good number of small vegan businesses tackling the sustainability issue seriously, as it often represents the main priority of their social responsibility strategy. On top of that, the research of innovative materials allow them to design outstanding styles that help the environment. One of these companies is Flamongo’s Life, a vegan shoe brand based in Spain.
The CEO of Flamingo’s Life, Carlos García Sánchez, kindly agreed to explain what it means to run a vegan and sustainable fashion brand.
Would you mind to shortly explain the main goals of your project? What makes Flamingo’s Life a sustainable brand?
The main objective of Flamingo’s Life is to save the planet from the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves.
I founded this company with the main idea to make footwear without killing animals, and with an exquisite design. As I grew up, I became aware of the ecological problem the world was in, and I broadened our horizons.
I began to think that political institutions had left an unresolved gap, and that our acts of consumption were the greatest political act we could exercise.
Fast fashion companies were delocalizing their supply chain to maximize their economic benefits, no matter how those items were made. In this way, backed by the policies of the countries involved, millions of workers (including children) are exploited, while the environment is greatly degraded.
With the aim of offering a solution to this problem, I founded an ‘activist company’, a company whose activity was to manufacture and sell footwear made with good materials for the planet, in terms of sustainability. A company whose supply chain is completely ethical in labor and social terms. To make sure of this, we manufacture in Elche (Spain), in the same city where we are based, to guarantee that all the people involved are fairly paid and can share work and social life.
In addition, each shoe collection is associated with a specific environmental problem, we donate 1€ for each pair of sneakers sold.
Why did you choose vegan materials for your footwear collections?
This is the first philosophical pillar of Flamingo’s Life. Before founding this company, I saw that most of the shoes were made of leather: to my eyes, they were millions of animals slaughtered every year, animals treated as if they were objects.
I sensed that there was an alternative to leather, and that the necessary technology to replace these materials already existed. Often, the vegan materials have the same, or even better characteristics, without the need of killing animals.
Animals are a value in themselves, we should not use them at our advantage.
We could see that Flamingo’s Life has recently partnered with B COME. Would you like to tell us more about this collaboration? Is it a further guarantee to ethical consumers?
This is my slogan: “There is no beauty without trust, and there is no trust without transparency.”
One of the pillars of our company is transparency, which allow us to be truthful and credible.
From the beginning, we have been very sincere and honest, but we wanted to go one step further: we asked a company to audit our production processes. We underwent B COME audit in order to know exactly the environmental impacts of all our production processes, to improve them, and to increase our credibility towards clients.’
To know more about this sustainable brand and their vegan sneakers, you can visit their website.
