MooShoes

In New York and online, cruelty free, animal-approved

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Vegan Footwear, Bags, Wallets & other Accessories

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MooShoes is a vegan-owned business that sells an assortment of cruelty-free footwear, bags, t-shirts, wallets, books and other accessories. MooShoes offers its services through the online store you’re currently reading this on as well as in its lovely retail stores in New York City and, as of 2014, Los Angeles. We’re open 7 days a week for your shopping pleasure. Check out our store hours and locations and come by to say ‘hey’.

The first cruelty-free store of its kind in NYC, MooShoes was founded in 2001 by sisters and Queens natives, Erica and Sara Kubersky. Originally located near the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan in a defunct butcher shop, MooShoes NYC moved to a space on Allen Street for a brief period before re-locating to its current location at 78 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It’s an amazing neighborhood, especially for vegans, and there’s a ton to do in the area.

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ETHICS

As a small business driven by ethics, we make it a point to support brands that are worker-friendly and sweatshop-free. A large portion of the products in our shop are made in union factories in the EU and Brazil, in strictly regulated worker-friendly factories. Novacas is our in house brand, and we visit the factories in Portugal annually.

We include country of origin and manufacturing details on our product pages to allow customers to make informed decisions about their purchases. We carry only a few brands that are mass-produced in order to provide a lower price point to make vegan shoes accessible for all.

Feel free to drop us a line at info@mooshoes.com for additional manufacturing information on any items that you may be interested in.

SUSTAINABILITY

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Many of the shoes we carry, including our house brand Novacas, are made of a high quality microfiber polyurethane that is free of PVC, plastic, and vinyl. This is a woven synthetic that breaks in, stretches, and breathes very similarly to leather or suede. Brands that use this material include Novacas, Good Guys, Bhava, Vegetarian Shoes, and Sydney Brown, among others. These materials are naturally water resistant and durable. Newer sustainable materials like apple leather (made from apple harvest waste) and Pinatex (made from pineapple harvest waste) are utilized as well.

Vegan materials have come a long way and the materials we use in our Novacas brand are more sustainable, less water-intensive, and less chemical-intensive than their leather counterparts. Our materials are EU Ecolabel certified, meaning they adhere to rigorous sustainability practices during the manufacturing process. You can learn more about this qualification here.

Collective Fashion Justice has a great explainer comparing the sustainability of cow leather vs. vegan leather here.

CIRCULAR PRODUCT CYCLE

We focus on carrying well-made quality vegan shoes so that they will last the wearer many years. Most of our shoes can also be economically resoled to add even more years to the shoe. We think of our shoes as investments – when we purchase a vegan shoe from a small company that makes it a point to use quality materials and ethical manufacturing processes, we may have to pay more initially but we’re being kinder to the earth and the workers. We’re also investing in a shoe that will last longer than a run of the mill “accidentally vegan” shoe.

RECYCLING/DONATING SHOES

If you reach a point where you are done with the shoe and they cannot be donated, you can recycle shoes at our NYC shop. If you’re out of state and would like to send in shoes for recycling, please email us info@mooshoes.com beforehand. We work with a local textile recycling organization, Wearable Collections, to keep old shoes out of the landfill. You are also welcome to recycle leather shoes at our shop, they don’t have to be shoes purchased from MooShoes. If you are local to NYC and have shoes in donate-able condition, you can drop them with us and we will donate them to our partners at Safe Horizon to get them to someone in need.

MooShoes Los Angeles was opened in the fall of 2014 in partnership with Katie Frichtel and Troy Farmer of raven + crow studio. After running raven + crow in Brooklyn for 10 years and acting as primary designers and creative directors for MooShoes for nearly as long, Katie and Troy picked up shop and moved to the sunny little hamlet of Los Angeles. Erica and Sara, long having wanted to open a second store, saw an opportunity and asked Katie and Troy to help them open their first expansion, having them design the space, choose lines for the west coast customers, and run the store after it opened.

MooShoes NYC is also home to a slew of rescued cats who were adopted from some of our favorite local organizations. We’ve been lucky enough to hold many events at both stores for many talented, generous individuals and organizations in the vegan community.

On top of all that, MooShoes is run by one of the greatest staffs ever. Don’t believe us? Come by, meet our staff, and see for yourself.

MooShoes has two brick-and-mortar locations—one on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and one in Silver Lake in Los Angeles. Come by, say hi, buy a shoe, chat, pet a store cat.

MooShoes New York
212.254.6512
info@mooshoes.com
78 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002 USA

By Subway:

Take the B or D train to the Grand Street stop or take the F, J, or M train to the Delancey Street stop.

Hours (NY):

Monday-Saturday: 1130AM-8PM; Sunday: 11-7PM
November 25: Closed; December 24: 1130AM–4PM; December 25: Closed; December 31: 1130AM–5PM; January 1: Closed

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