About us: Veganline.com was about the first vegan shoe shop online in 1998 to use this cussed, anti-fashion DIY way of selling some Bouncing Boots and Bouncing Shoes we'd had made. We found a few other bits of ethically-made footwear at a wholesaler. Gradually people asked for other things and a stock built-up of everything unfashionable - wellies, slippers with hook and loop fastening to reduce the risk of falls, and even a few things made in China like vegan football boots. Now we are getting more stuff specially made in the UK - court shoes with safe 1" heels and microfibre uppers, high heel boots, and more to come soon.

Veganline.com's site is only 15 years old but looks old fashioned. When set-up in about 1998, there were no Paypal buttons available and we had to get a merchant account which was rare in those days. The only way to use it was via a remote-hosted shopping cart called mals-e commerce which shares secure order forms amongst dozens of shops and passes the order details to us. As you work through checkout process you'll find that the url is a puzzline "ww8.aitsafe.com" and the the page that asks for card details begins "https" and has a certificate.

At present we have no PR agent, no web design company, no office outside home, no distributor: no - that's not true. We sell some of our styles via Vegancross.co.uk, 73 Caledonian Road London N1. Please phone to find out if your shoe size or style is in stock before making a special journey: 0208 833 2315

Answers: ask for more on the contact form below Press coverage: news.htm

Acknowledgements, Belts sizes, Catalogues, Cheques, Cheques and Currencies - see Overseas, Fair labour,
Childrens Shoes
Overseas: Currency conversion, Last posting dates, Airmail, Surface mail, cost price, returns stickers, replacements
postage, privacy, returns, shoe sizes and sale shoes, security, stockists

These answers have just been moved to /more.htm
What's wrong with leather, Why me?
What's veganline.com? Who? Why small?

Acknowledgements are sent automatically. We usually post shoes the same day, or at least the same week before we ask permission to delay more. We don't charge your card until the order is ready (unless you use Paypal or Nochex, but we can refund those if there is a problem). Everything on the site is usually in stock.

Belt sizes: If you measure your waist we can supply a belt that has a centre hole about that length from the buckle and an outer hole two or three inches further. This is the belts page

Catalogues: We can make a colour print-out of the web site and send it to anyone who asks.

Cheques in the UK to "J Robertson" including £4.50 postage on orders over £20. Please write your order on the back of the cheque. If you need a paper invoice before writing a cheque, please begin your order on the shopping cart and print the most relevant page. It's the third or fourth out of four or five, with "invoice from Veganline.com" written at the bottom.

Childrens Shoes are a problem: this is a statement on it.

Labelling is imposed by government to say what country a shoe is made in and what parts of it are leather or textile. From these labels it's possible to guess how green a vegan shoe is and something about the civil and welfare rights of the people who made it.

• Fair trade labelling from Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International members - the blue & green symbol on coffee - does not much exist in a standardised way for shoes. The scheme only applies to certain listed countries that have been judged third-world at some point in the past. UK and US factories are excluded as well as Turkish, while Indian can be included. As the wealth of different countries changes more rapidly than most of us can keep-track of, the list stays the same. The general problem of knowing what suppliers are doing and whether the money trickles-down is made worse in societies without proper votes or human rights like China, so the scheme can't be monitored there even though China is on the list. Even where it's legal to ask questions, a shoe's origins are wrapped in a long supply system which is seldom all in one country or known to one person. Small shops, like individual consumers and even large branded clothing merchants have trouble finding out which of their shoes are good shoes with bad PR and which are not-so-bad shoes with good PR. Just as the classic idea that buying cheapest helps everyone is messy and easy to find-fault with, the idea that trying to buy more goods from countries with a welfare state, or more goods from the better third world employers and fairtrade certified ones is just as messy. Ethletic and Sole Rebels shoes are fair trade certified.
  
  Some importers belong to a trade association - the Ethical Trade Initiative - which compares notes about minimum standards and helps the companies make sure their stories to the press are consistant with each other; the products of these companies aren't singled-out.
  
• Country of origin labels lead to information about the human rights in each country: the detailed reports from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, and the ratings agency Democracy Index which attempts to compare democracies. There is no clear comparison for welfare rights, but these are important too.
  
  Veganline.com buys the maximum proportion of shoes from countries with useful courts, votes, and a welfare state. Others might sensibly think that to buy - indirectly- from the worst places on earth is the default option for improving conditions in bad places; that the Primark buyer is already helping the third world to a certain extent and that it is only the odds-and-ends like organic recycled laces that are newsworthy in this process. This is a neat view. Everyone reading this will have bought apparel from wherever their usual shop gets it, and to pretend not would by hypocritical. To buy from the worst place in earth (or wherever cheapness is combined with productivity: Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Burma rather than southern Sudan) is also a rational view held by well-informed people. Mrs Thatcher stated a decade or two ago that to trade with China might improve human rights there but she has still not been proved right, much, much as conditions have improved in Taiwan.
  For those who want to feel good in their clothes, there is another option of preferring goods from Taiwan to China, or whatever the equivalent is: to buy a few products from nice places in the hope of encouraging them more viable than nasty places.
  
  To buy shoes from nice countries and link to league tables on the net are ways of strengthening the economies of nice countries and the importance of league tables on the net. These benefits are matched by more obscure ones. The chances of wealth trickling-down the buying chain, so that the shoe maker is paid more and the advertising department less, is greater if the shoe is made in a country with universal schools & pensions than in China which privatized its hospitals in the 1990s for example or Burma which never had many. Environmental and employment laws are much more detailed in some countries than others, too.
  
  Governments and pressure groups are much less interested in publicising the countries with the most comfortable welfare states than those with the most democracy and legal rights. The CIA World Fact book even slips-in a criticism of Italy's "excessive pensions". And federal countries like India and the USA can have very different welfare in each state from which shoes are stamped "made in USA" or "Made in India" so the idea of a country does fall-down for this purpose. Some vegan shoes shops have used a factory in Wisconsin. Veganline.com used a UK factory which then moved to India - we have no way of knowing which state.
  
  
• AZO In the UK and Europe, the use of 22 suspect AZO dyes have been discouraged by laws banning their use in each member state, following an EU directive. The dyes are most likely still used, for example in cloth and shoe uppers brought-in to the EU, but company buyers have to be aware of the problem and batches of material - including all the microfibre shoe upper - that are made in the EU should be AZO-free, as should cheap shoe-uppers made in Albania for making into shoes in Italy.
  
  
• VOC In the UK and Europe, governments have agreed to outlaw industrial-scale glue users using volatile organic compounds to dissolve their glue as most of us consumers do. Only the trickier process of forming an emulsion of glue in hot water to spray onto the bits is legal. When a shoe is marked "made in UK" or "made in EU" that generally means that the uppers have been stretched round a mould and stuck-on to a sole in that country, so it's fair to say that a shoe made in the EU has produced few volatile organic compounds and this has a direct effect on footwear employees: an old survey of Portuguese shoe factory staff found reduced fertility among people who had to smell volatile organic solvents all day before the EU directive, and that effect is now reduced by buying EU shoes. Surprisingly, it is possible to glue shoes at home - many UK motorcycle boots used to be made by home workers and some Portuguese loafers still are - so the process may be beyond the reach of anyone who can enforce the law, but hopefully home workers are at least aware of the problem and can open a window and turn-on a fan.
  
  
• The Footwear (Indication of Composition) Labelling Regulations 1995 give any UK consumer a chance to see how environmentally friendly a product is: a recent UN report, Livestock's Long Shadow, listed massive environmental benefits of reducing the use of animal products, quite apart from reducing cruelty to animals which is obviously a sane thing to be interested in. There's no need to read the whole thing. The first page or two summerizes the rest as do in the Vegan Society's leaflets Eating the Earth and Give Leather the Boot.
  
  One problem of about ethical and environmental claims made of footwear is that they concentrate too much on the details, like whether something is organic, or made in an interesting employment project in the third world, or improves conditions in China by a small amount while still undercutting factories in the UK or India. From a journalist's point of view it is an attempt to find new news in footwear. Footwear changes slower than tailoring because the tooling costs are higher; a fashion designer can get a sewing machine for free to make samples while a shoe designer can't do much before buying £15,000 stretching machines from Taiwan or £1,000 injection moulds for each size of sole. Exceptions are larger companies which know they can sell a thousand or a hundred thousand and factor-in the tooling and set-up costs without even thinking about it - one of their suppliers' criticisms - but these produce for the sleepy middle market making them boring to read about even for the people who buy middle-market shoes from mainstream shops.
  
  Some shoemakers are extra-ordinarilly thrifty with two of Veganline.com's suppliers still keeping a hundred year-old machines in their factories and some of the moulds or lasts dating from the 1940s, but it's hard to report a green use of tools unless you're writing for Footwear Today in the past, before it closed.
  
  From a reader's point of view, journalists' articals over many years have been absorbed and digested and tend to say that footwear has gone to China now; there is nothing to be done in countries with things like courts votes or a welfare state, only attempts to help outsiders from even poorer countries join the market or manufacturers with a green and organic tinge. This is not a statement of the facts. Some footwear is still produced in the UK, Spain, France and Portugal for example in factories following employment laws and paying taxes towards welfare states. It's just what's in the papers.
  
  If there was a fair way of saying how quickly work should move from comfortable countries to hard-working countries, it would be possible to say that that production fairly transferred from the UK or India to China is not newsworthy in either country until any unusual fact emerges in either country, which is called news. If it is not possible to say how quickly work should transfer: if some governments hike-up or hike-down their exchange rates to suit the elite in the UK or China, as both do, if autocracies compete unfairly with welfare states and the judges of dumping into the EU and US are Peter Mandelson or his US counterpart, then it's hard to know what fair trade is.
  
  Should an enterprising factory that stays open in the UK be reported like a charity? Or if it's working conditions are better than China but worse than the UK, a bad scandal if in the UK or a beacon of hope in China? Reporting of textile workers' conditions suggests that, after being flogged to death, if their bodies are disposed of in an eco-friendly way then that gets a good press if it's in China but if the same shop employs people for less than the basic wage in Manchester than that's a bad thing because it makes a mess on the pavement. Turkish, Indian or Indonesian factories are not reported as good or bad because the two extremes are so hard to report, any position between the two is impossible to report. That's an exaggerated description but one company - Patagonia - with a very good reputation for well made hiking boots, transparency, enthusiasm and such made it into the Observer Ethical Fashion awards for just those reasons, even though their adverts the same year for factory inspectors mentioned almost nothing about employee's conditions, the shoes were made in China and they were made out of leather. Such is Patagonia's transparency that their newly employed factory inspector posted a believable account of his views in video and audio format on U-tube. He stated that the only job he wouldn't want to do among his employer's contractor's staff in China was gluing; that the choice of leathers in the past had been extravagant "because it's like putting one plate through the dishwasher" and of course he mentions nothing about employing staff in an autocracy. He might mention it in private, but even this transparent company with its good reputation for good boots doesn't write "we support autocracies" in its PR and somehow this factory inspector must have known this when he considered what to put on U-tube.
  
  In this impossibility are placed fashion journalists, who by nature are unlikely to be vegetarian or vegan because their job is to report on leather; they are unlikely to be troubled by goods made outside welfare states or democracies because that has been the overwhelming part of their job these last decades and anyway factory closures belong on the business pages. The job of a fashion journalist is to make a paper look more upmarket than any human being really is in order to attract advertisers and advertiser's readers. To report the posh new Hunter Wellington Boot for only £2,999 (Observer Special Offer) rather than the fact that Hunter now imports Chinese wellington boots. Gradually this job is turning-in to the job of reporting whether a boot made in the UK is better than a boot made in China; for the world of fashion journalism and shoes made in reasonable conditions out of reasonable materials to meet.
  
  
• More labels will follow: Veganline.com is increasing the range of symbols and information links next to each shoe so that consumers can decide what to buy. Over time this information might include the more attention-grabbing features like a shoe being made in a staff-owned company, made using recycled parts, using organic hemp canvas or being fit for the compost bin.
  
  
• We have not yet found a neat comparison of welfare systems and access to justice in different countries and Indian states. For example, Albania where most of the safety boots are made is said to have free hospitals, but we haven't linked to an online table to confirm that. Likewise there are Indian states that provide good free hospitals, but labelling regulations just require "India". Those who produce tables tend to be in the USA or Europe, making it hard to quote smaller human rights web sites published closer to the problem. If you know of any kind of league table, please let us know using the form below.
  

Postage in the UK is charged at two rates, for different prices of parcel

£00-20     - 2nd class postage is free. You pay to return.
£20+ £4.50 - parcel post.
If you get a "sorry you were out" card, try royalmail.com/redelivery
We can also deliver to Collectplus.co.uk shops & counters for £4.50

Overseas Currency conversion is normally by your Visa / Mastercard company who may charge something like 2½% commission. Nochex and Paypal are likely to give an exact quote in your currency before you order. Some pages include an estimated price including postage to Europe in Euro. All purchases end with a confirmation screen linking the total price to xe.com's estimate in any currency. If this is a shock, please cancel before we process the order or send the shoes.

If you prefer not to use a payment card, Paypal can be loaded from a bank account in an increasing number of countries - you can experiment on the free-form Paypal page to find which ones.

For wholesale orders we recommend Currencyfair.ie bank transfers.

Overseas last posting dates are here

American & Australian airmail is worked-out on the shopping cart from the price of the order:

£00-05 £02 for most wallets 
£05-20 £10 for most slippers & belts
£20+   £13 for most shoes 
Quotation by weight over 2kg (4.4 lbs)
Free outbound surface mail for replacements (you pay postage to us)
Small charge for airmail replacements - about $10

Cheapest US return is usually first class small packet from USPS

American & Australian surface mail is cheaper & greener but slower. It can be chosen as an option on the cart

• North America - up to 6 weeks
• South America, Africa & Asia - up to 8 weeks
• Australasia - up to 12 weeks
• Eastern Europe - please ask

European mail is worked out on the shopping from the price of the order Air and surface mail are the same price

£00-15 £02 for most wallets, belts thermal T shirts & cheapest slippers
£15-99 £08 for most shoes boots & slippers
Quotation by weight over 2kg

Privacy: your data is not shared with others, such as mailing list companies, nor used for excessive follow-up promotions by us. We do give email addresses to couriers.

It's possible to opt-in to quarterly emails with a specific option on the order form. These don't exist at present but if set-up they would have an opt-out on each email sent. Sometimes lists are set-up of people who want to be told when a batch of shoes come-in. These are only used once. Some people use changedetection.com to monitor additions to the sale pages. Each change detection email has an opt-out link.

Returns & exchanges of goods which were as described, but not as hoped-for or don't fit

You pay

• Return postage.
• Please enclose a note asking for a refund or replacement size.
• Please return shoes in a condition you would accept yourself if buying new.
• There is no fixed deadline nor rule about the condition of the box; we try to re-use most of them.

We pay

• refund of the original price - usually back onto your card
• outbound postage of the replacement, if we have it available, at the cheapest rate
• Airmail replacements to Australasia and the Americas are a special case.
  Most people prefer to pay £5 to upgrade to airmail.
  Some are happy with cheap green 12 or 8 week surface mail which we pay for.

We have to say

• Whether the consumer or the supplier would be responsible for the cost of returning.
  It's you, because we sell mainly European-made products on quite low margins; that's part of the deal.
  Obviously you can't return a postal service under section #13a of the Distance Selling Regulations
• We have to say where the return address is.
  Unfortunately we don't have a return address in the America or Australia - it's just the UK one below.
• Usually your shoes come with a chit that says "please return with a note for refund or replacement" and the address in large letters: 2 Avenue Gardens, London SW14 8BP.
  American and Australian customers get a reminder about the cost of airmail replacements, and a request to write "returns - no tariff due" or such on the customs sticker to avoid tariffs on parcels valued over £18.

Shoe Sizes / Sale Shoes: there is a size chart at the foot of each page, like this. Click on a UK size for sale shoes in that size. There is also a full-page about sizes. Where shoes are sold in several sizes there is a drop-down menu to choose the size, using the scale that the shoe was made in, either continental or UK.

Security & Privacy for card details on the secure ordering server can be checked by your browser as well as having certificates like this Click on the form itself and then check your browser's help file for instructions, or right-click & experiment. The ordering system is run by an e-commerce company with its own regular security checks, including the system for getting data from their web page to Veganline.com. You may also use Nochex or Paypal if you prefer to keep your card number private: they are among the payment options on the shopping cart, which will fill-in the order, amount and the payee for you. Generally, online orders are easiest to track and less accident-prone than orders by phone and post.

Stockists: The office address is 2 Avenue Gds, London SW14 8BP, 020 8286 9947. Secret Society of Vegans now have a London retail shop where you can walk-in and try-on one or two styles of shoes.
Please check opening times and stock in advance before making a special visit as they only have a few Bouncing Shoes and Boots; for the moment there isn't enough stock for them to have the full size range.
Wholesale customers are welcome to get in touch - we hope to have an automated stock control system in place soon which will state what's here and how much we'd charge a repeat trade customer. Margins are obviously tight on UK-made batch-produced goods, but we can offer a cheaper price than retail.
Please do not visit Avenue Gardens to try shoes on as not all the stock is on this site, there's no show-room and not much space to try-on, and we are not always in.

There are plenty of other questions, less directly related to shoes, which are now answered on the pages

/more.htm about why there isn't a shoe industry in the UK, why the shoes aren't more trendy, why we don't sell childrens shoes and more.

/why.htm why vegan

What's wrong with leather, Why me?
What's veganline.com? Who? Why small?