Doshi

Fashionable Vegan Bags, Backpacks and Accessories

About Us

Doshi FCSA (Fine Clothes Shoes and Accessories) offers non-leather (vegan leather) handbags, briefcases, backpacks, belts and accessories. We hope to offer vegan shoes at some point in the next few years.

Doshi was founded to provide smart, fashionable and quality vegan products to people who have ethical, religious or environmental beliefs that lead them to seek vegan products. While the roots of this movement go back to the days of hippies and the 1960’s, our goal is to meet the needs of smart, socially and environmentally conscious professionals, jet-setters and fashionistas.

We are based in the suburbs of southern California but we’d like to think that we’re not just part of just one city, state, or even country. We want to be a part of lives in every place that people share our ideals for a better world. We believe that’s everywhere.

What Makes Us Different?

Intention.

Unlike an accidentally vegan product that you might find on Amazon, our founder is vegan and intentionally set out to create this company. He oversees the design of products, picks out the materials, and directly works with factories to make intentionally vegan goods for vegan and vegan friendly customers.

Intentionally Vegan Design: We study trends, consult designers, and keep an awareness of the marketplace to make sure that our products keep you up to date.

Intentionally Vegan Materials: When Paras realized that ordinary PU was an inferior material, he set out to find the best vegan materials. Most companies talk about using “high quality PU” for their vegan leather. The phrase doesn’t mean too much. Paras spent years researching where the best vegan materials come from.

Intentionally Vegan Manufacturing: Vegan products don’t stop at materials. Our partner factories know that our products need to be vegan from top to bottom. All glues, thread, structural materials, interlining, and hardware are 100% vegan. No animal products are used in our goods whatsoever.

Intentionally Connected: We support several vegan organizations from those pushing forward animals rights to farm sanctuaries taking care of our non human friends.

Paras Doshi

Paras grew up in sunny southern California and worked for the City of Los Angeles for 17 years before leaving to pursue his mission to provide quality, fashionable, vegan bags and accessories to the world. Paras has donated and raised money for pro animal non-profits and animal sanctuaries over the years. He grew up vegetarian and became vegan in 2012.

Paras first confronted the issue of finding vegan accessories in 2001 when he started his first job. The difficulty with finding classy, fashionable, and durable vegan accessories persisted over the years no matter how many brands he tried. Eventually Paras decided to venture out and start Doshi to address this need. Doshi launched in 2017 and Paras has been working on delivering this idea of classy, fashionable, and quality non-leather goods ever since.

Paras holds a B.S. Finance degree from California Polytechnic University, Pomona and an MBA from the University of Southern California.

An audio interview with Paras, December 2020: https://plantbasedprofitsshow.com/paras-doshi/

In case you’re wondering, Markus, the cute little Boston Terrier belongs to Byron, a friend who was living up in Vancouver. Byron graciously allowed Paras to stay with him while Doshi was attending the Vegan Expo in 2019. Markus and Paras became buddies while Paras was up there. Markus might be the happiest dog around.

Tejas Doshi

Tejas is Paras’ funnier younger brother. He’s the guy helping pack our orders and get them out on time, he’s the guy in the Doshi polos attending vegfests around the country and he’s the guy helping Paras with the warehouse, inventory, and sales.
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Nadine Rich

Nadine will soon be moving on to grow Cruelty Free Models in early 2021 but over the last three years, Nadine has helped Paras with communications and graphics support of every kind from newsletters to email to social media, and been indispensable with her consistency in getting stuff done. Nadine will continue to provide advice and support.
Nadine has made it her life’s goal to help animals in need. This goal led her to volunteer at numerous shelters and rescues, lobby for animal welfare laws, and even open her own dog spa for 15 years.

Additionally, she started programs such as Delta Cares (which helped pet parents in her hometown care for their pets during tough times) and Cruelty Free Models (which encourages fashion brands to use cruelty-free and ethical industry professionals). Besides advocating for animals, Nadine also enjoys eating vegan and vegetarian food, traveling, photography, and nephology. Though originally from Virginia, she currently resides in Costa Rica with her husband, five kids, and two dogs.

Ilona Goossens

Ilona joined us in 2020 and handles our PR outreach efforts, newsletter, merchandising and frankly, as much as we can throw at her. We’re blessed that she’s part of our team!

Our Products:

We design our products to be practical and useful, we choose materials and construction methods that are meant to hold up to frequent use, we pay our suppliers for the more difficult work we demand, and we stand behind our goods. Eco-friendliness and sustainability are a function of how long a product lasts and what materials it’s made from. We will continue to push on every frontier until we make beautiful products that are beautiful, last long, and then disappear back into the earth when we are done using them. We have to do all of this while providing our customers value. To improve the world, our products need to be accessible to everyone; not just a select few.

Prototypes get a workout before going to production. They’re scratched, dropped, tugged on, and pulled. We test pockets, zippers, slots and handles. We often have multiple rounds of revisions which cause our suppliers to have fits but we like finding problems… so you don’t.

Factories:

We visit the factories where we manufacture goods. We look for clean factories where we ask terrible amounts of questions to management to understand product construction, environmental practices and workers’ well being.

Factories in the places we manufacture often have a variety of certifications to show social compliance. One of the most common is the Business and Social Compliance Initiative (http://www.saasaccreditation.org/bsci) certification. We are pushing to have each factory BSCI audited. BSCI is not a certification or accreditation. It is a methodology that allows for factories to be social compliance audited which in turn helps to improve working conditions for companies within the supply chain.

Doshi and the Environment:

When we set about to make a product, we consider the materials being used, how the product is being made and look to find ways that we can make the product last. Synthetic materials have made huge strides in minimizing the resources used to create them. We do our best to find factories that purchase recycled base material and minimize the use of chemicals and solvents when making their materials.

Why not leather? Isn’t it just a by product?

Studies show that the source of a great deal of the world’s pollution comes from livestock. It’s not the animals’ fault. Humans just breed too many of them. The lifecycle of a cow involves great deals of resource consumption and waste production. From our reading, studies and back of the envelope calculations, we believe that the carbon footprint needed to produce a bag or backpack from synthetic materials is vastly smaller than what is needed to produce the same bag using an equivalent amount of leather. Further, much of the leather found in mass produced goods is treated with petroleum based compounds at every step, from tanning to it’s final finish.

Ok, that’s our part. Here’s your part:

We hope that when you buy our products, you’ll use them often so that what we take from the environment is used to its fullest. When you’re done with our products, please donate them so that others may put them to good use.

Links:

Animal Agriculture and the environment:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/study-claims-meat-creates-half-of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html

http://www.takepart.com/video/2015/05/29/leather-pollution

http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/asia-india-toxic-pollution-leather-industry-health-problems

What is vegan leather?

Vegan leather is any material that can be used as an animal leather alternative but which has no animal content. Vegan leather was historically made using synthetic materials like vinyl and polyurethane (PU) but can also be made from organic materials like pineapple fibers. This leads to a number of questions as to what material is good for the animals, environment, and durability.

Most people are familiar with PU leather. The interesting thing about PU is that it’s actually mostly polyester or nylon with a thin coating of polyurethane on top so PU is mostly, not PU. Is PU leather vegan? Yes, but as we’ll discuss in this article, it’s not something that you want.

What about all of these vegan leathers that are made from plants? Most of them are like the standard PU discussed above in that they aren’t really plant based. Most companies have just found a way to attach a very thin layer of plant based material from the bark of cork trees, apples, or cactus onto a poly-cotton backing and call this vegan leather. It’s stretching the truth… a lot. At the moment the closest that we have to plant based, non-synthetic vegan leathers are Pinatex (non woven material made from pineapple bio waste), Mycelium (Mushroom Leather), and Kraft Paper.

*Note the makers of Pinatex prefer for their material not to be labeled as a vegan leather.

We often get asked: If you’re not using animal leather than what is it?

We most often get the question – if it isn’t (animal) leather than what is it made of? Among the different materials available to replace leather, we use Microfiber PU as our vegan leather. Of course there’s no animal content in the material but we preserve the moniker “leather” to give people an idea of what the material will feel like. Microfiber is the key term as Microfiber based vegan leather is the highest grade of synthetic leather commercially available in the market today.

Microfiber vegan leather consists of two parts.

1) Microfiber base – The microfiber base is the most important part of the material. The microfiber is unlike clothing in that it is non-woven. Instead of being woven like cloth, the microfibers are made to coagulate in three dimensions so that they mimic the structure of skin. The resulting material is soft, supple, breathable, and much more durable than the any alternative that we have tested. These qualities are the key difference between the material that we use and ordinary PU discussed above. Ordinary PU has a woven base material which stretches and does not hold the top coat of polyurethane coat well. In the long run, bags made of ordinary PU crack and peel.

2) Polyurethane top coat – The polyurethane on top helps create different looks, textures, and feels. In our materials, the adhesion to the microfiber base layer is extremely strong.

The resulting material is generally extremely durable and often outperforms leather in a variety of tests. Microfiber suede generally does not require any polyurethane at all. When considering the manufacturing process for animal leather, vegan leather is much more sustainable – especially when it comes from factories that minimize use of water and solvents. Factories making microfiber vegan leather often understand that this premium material is being chosen intentionally by high end brands. They are the most motivated amongst the material suppliers to offer quality products that are often also eco-friendly. Some factories are starting to offer materials that feature a recycled base material.

The vegan leather that looks like animal leather (Microfiber) actually performs and lasts like high quality animal leather. Ordinary PU (top left) is a cheap substitute that has been used for decades. It is unfortunate that companies using this cheap material are simply changing their marketing and passing off a cheap substitute as vegan leather to capitalize on the vegan market. We’re vegans committed to bring you the best, not fooling our community.

Not all synthetic leather is made equally. Microfiber PU is the closest material to what we might term true “vegan leather.”

In the manufacturing world, most companies use alternatives to leather to make lower grade products. These alternatives often lack durability on many levels – peeling, crocking and tensile strength to name a few. These lower grade products have hardware and construction methods that match the quality of the material.

Manufacturing is a cost driven industry and so to varying degrees, you get what you pay for. We never wanted to put cheap products into the market and so most of our products will use forms of microfiber leather or microfiber suede. We do not use polyester based polyurethane in any of our goods and never use PVC (polyvinyl chloride) as the main material (though it may be present if we ever use rubber like feet for a bag). So far, we have not used PVC either.

Microfiber leather and microfiber suede are the only true animal leather alternatives as they were intentionally made to mimic the hand feel of leather and often outperform leather in durability. Of course microfiber leather has several grades as well. We continuously look for materials that meet higher performance standards and almost always wind up purchasing the highest end vegan leathers from the most expensive material factories (see our alligator inspired vegan leather here!). We can’t help it. We love durable, beautiful materials and we want our customers to have the very best.

Eco-Friendly and Sustainable Materials

While our microfiber based vegan leather is an amazing material, our long term goal is to shift our material use away from petroleum based products and use materials that are recycled, recyclable, and biodegradable. To that end, we have been using Kraft Paper (check out our kraft paper tote), an ultra-durable paper which does not breakdown when wet. Kraft Paper is an under appreciated material that is lightweight, durable, and to large extent, biodegradable. The core component of Kraft paper is cellulose.

We also introduced cork, which we appreciate but are not completely in love with because cork materials do not stand on their own. They require a backing which is often polyester. However, cork points us in the right direction, moving towards plant based materials. Many people have asked us about using materials such as apple leather and most recently, cactus leather. Both of these materials are similar to cork in that the base material is largely polyester, cotton, or a poly-cotton blend.

When this is the case, we often believe that it is only marginally beneficial to use these materials. To call any of these materials, cork, apple or cactus leather as such is misleading in that these materials make up, in our estimation, less than 10% of the actual material. While we appreciate the efforts, we believe that to truly be considered a vegan leather, the material should do more than add a top coating or top layer to a mostly standard material.

Pineapple leather?

Perhaps the most exciting and well known material we will soon have products made from is Pinatex. We have started production with Pinatex (derived from waste pineapple fiber) and will have products available later in 2021. Pinatex is most of what we are looking for in a material. It is up to 80% biodegradable and starts off as plant waste from pineapple harvests in the Philippines. The company making this material, aims to make it 100% biodegradable over time. Our only issue with this material is price. It is an expensive material, 3 to 4 times more expensive than our high end microfiber leather and 30 to 40 times more expensive than ordinary PU (low end imitation leather).

Mushroom leather?

We often have friends ask us if we’ve heard of mushrooms leather. The answer is Yes. We’re always super excited about finding non-petroleum based materials and so we contacted the mushroom leather supplier. Their cost of materials is (no exaggeration) 20x to 100x the cost of a high quality microfiber leather available in the market today. It’s rather impractical.

When the cost of these materials and availability becomes more reasonable, we’ll provide those materials to you. And here’s another way to think about it, instead of us producing a mushroom leather briefcase that we’ll market for $1,000, buy one of our’s for $200, give the $800 to a responsible charity that supports the causes you believe in and know that you’ve made a greater difference in everyone’s life. Smart is better than novel.

Other materials

We push and specify that our suppliers use quality components. Our philosophy is simply that if you don’t have to replace your goods that much longer, we don’t have to use resources to replace that product.