About Vegan Supermarket UK
“How a flying laptop, tiny budget, many sleepless nights and an all-consuming passion to stop animal cruelty led one man to create Vegan Supermarket UK”.
Vegan Supermarket UK is an Online Shopping Centre for vegan, cruelty free and eco-friendly products.
Working with fully vetted manufacturers, producers and retailers, our ‘online vegan shopping centre’ brings a massive range of vegan products under one virtual roof.
Consumers can browse a range of categories in search of the products they need, including food, wine, clothing, footwear, beauty and perfumes.
Founded by Brian Muskett, Vegan Supermarket UK has developed relationships with some of the most respected vegan retailers and manufacturers in the UK.
By constantly scouring the market for high-quality, cruelty-free products, our extensive online marketplace makes vegan shopping easier, faster and lots more fun.
Brian – Founder, Vegan Supermarket UK
I am very excited where Vegan Supermarket UK is heading and I have even bigger plans for the future but this page is dedicated to sharing how it all began.
How It All Started…
I was very lucky to be born into a loving family who adored all animals and I grew up with the family pet, ‘Lassie’ a border collie. Like many people of my era, we weren’t even remotely vegan.
As I grew up it became increasingly obvious that the world had a great deal of animal cruelty and my young mind just couldn’t fathom out why.
It turns out that there are many reasons but one of the main drivers is money.
It’s a huge subject but basically there is a significant amount of public disinformation from ‘vested interests’ – like big livestock businesses, right up to heavily-lobbied government departments, all designed to keep us buying their ‘happy’ farm animal products.
This troubled me greatly and I planned to dedicate my life to stopping animal cruelty when I ‘magically’ became a millionaire by age 30 – “This time next year Rodney!”
Anyway, ‘life sort of happened’.
My gorgeous wife, 3 fantastic children, 5 beautiful grandchildren (& counting) and rapidly advancing years have empowered me to actually do something.
In 2013 I worked very hard on setting up Animal Welfare org. It was a huge learning curve both fundamentally and technically.
There Were Five Takeaways From This Venture.
- I turned vegetarian (I now realise that wasn’t enough)
- ‘Animal welfare’ still enables animal cruelty (think RSPCA Freedom Food, Red Tractor, Grass Fed and all that highly misleading bullsh*t).
- I posted a lot of cruelty-related articles & images to bring the unseen horror to a wider audience.
- Distressing images upset many people and understandably, they didn’t stay on my site (but maybe they collectively helped to fuel the rise of veganism that we are now seeing)
- The research work upset me terribly.
- I was just highlighting a problem and not offering a solution.
- Veganism was only for hippies and tree huggers – apparently.
So, Website Iteration 2 Was Formed; www.cruelty-free-lifestyle.org
I learned that..
- Necessity is the mother of all invention. We need to keep innovating.
- I had to provide a viable alternative to products that cause cruelty.
- I needed to monetise my site to pay for running expenses (see ‘Affiliate Disclosure’ below).
- I didn’t have any funds to set up a buy/sell operation (ironically, I turned that challenge into a successful affiliate business model with a unique USP!)
- I had to research vegan and cruelty free products and the business that sold these products in the UK (easier said than done!)
- Many sites were advertising ‘Get all your vegan products here’ and yet they were also selling ‘ethical’ meat – (that’s when my laptop nearly went flying through the window!)
- THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ETHICAL MEAT!!
- Nobody searched for my keywords, so I disappeared down bottomless pit of Search Engine Optimisation.
- My product pages sometimes had incorrect prices because suppliers updated them periodically. This resulted in a poor user experience.
- I wasn’t going to let these problems stop me. I’ve always loved a challenge, and the solution was obvious.
Vegan Supermarket UK Was Born
- I’m keeping up-to-date with Search Engine Optimisation to enable ethical shoppers to find our Vegan Shopping Centre on the internet.
- I have aligned with trusted suppliers of vegan and cruelty free products.
- Vegans are busy people and they don’t have time to search around online, so, they can come here instead and find everything in one place.
- Customers need to have confidence in a website that recommends ONLY vegan and cruelty free products.
- Its still a labour of love but I think I’m getting there, as people seem to like what I’m doing.
- What started with a concept has grown into a passion to provide the best vegan shopping experience for everyone – but our core animal rights values will always remain at the forefront of everything we do.
Affiliate Disclosure
Vegan Supermarket UK is reader-supported. That means, when you buy through the product links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. As we mentioned before, we don’t sell products ourselves, we are an online vegan shopping centre. and we’re here to make your vegan shopping a lot easier.
We only recommend trusted vegan businesses. We don’t allow adverts that have not been extensively reviewed by us. This way, we can be sure that we only promote products and services that are vegan and cruelty free.
On the face of it, this could put us at a slight disadvantage because once we refer a customer to a business, that customer has no need to return to us.
However. there are many reasons to shop through us!
- The businesses we refer you to, don’t have the full range of products that we have here!
- We rely on you shopping through us because we are reader supported and that means we can keep innovating and bringing you the best vegan shopping experience.
- That means we can continue to discover even more vegan and cruelty free products and services!
- You don’t pay any more if you shop through us than, if you went direct.
- If you don’t shop through us, we can’t pay the bills and we would have to shut down the site. That would make me very sad!
- Many shoppers have their favourite businesses and it’s tempting to go direct to them.
- So we’ve made it really easy to go direct and still shop through us, by clicking on our Shop menu at the top, (that way we can still get any commissions).
- You will still get all the lovely discounts and points from these business and also we can stay in business Win-Win – Yay!
- We hope to introduce loyalty vouchers and prizes in the future.
What’s Next?
We started with a tiny budget and no venture capital firms backing us. It’s thanks to our returning customers, that share our passion for animal rights and ethical vision that we are where we are – and we are here to stay!
We have big plans for the future and are really excited about where we can take Vegan Supermarket UK.
We want to provide the ultimate go-to vegan shopping portal for our customers.
We invite you to join us on this journey, and let’s create a kinder and more sustainable world – together.
Here’s some resources that are well worth checking out.
Cowspiracy
The Game Changers
Seaspiracy
Milked Documentary
Also, if you like what we do, please tell your friends! If you are having difficulty using our website, or have suggestions – please tell me!
I sincerely hope you enjoy your vegan & cruelty free shopping with us! :- )
Brian Muskett – Founder