Our Cruelty Free Mission

When you shop vegan, please may I ask that you ALWAYS shop THROUGH us. It will help us achieve our dream of stopping animal cruelty. Thank You!

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My story…

How It All Started: Childhood: Family and Furry Friends

Born into a loving family that loves animals, I grew up alongside our beautiful dog called Lassie. As was the norm in the 60’s, we were not remotely vegan. Meat and two veg was the order of the day.

The Dawn of Realization

As I got older, I was confronted by the harsh realities of animal cruelty. It hit me like an express train! The gravity of this issue was incomprehensible to my young mind.

Delving deeper, I discovered that one of the main culprits was financial gain, perpetuated by misinformation spread by influential entities like large livestock corporations allegedly in cahoots with government ministers.

I thought status quo was a rock band but it transpired that the true meaning of the phrase facilitated the continuation of animal cruelty. With teenage hormones racing through my body, this state of affairs made me incredibly angry.

A Plan Unfolds

This revelation deeply disturbed me and sparked a relentless drive to eradicate animal cruelty, a goal I planned to pursue once I became a millionaire at 25. Well, life had other plans! I came to the realisation that my brain power was more Ford Anglia than 3 litre Capri.

Fast Forward

Inevitably, the millionaire part very successfully evaded me. However, my passion for stopping animal cruelty remains as strong as ever.

My wonderful wife, three amazing children, and five beautiful grandchildren (and counting!), coupled with the wisdom of rapidly advancing years, motivated me to take action.

Setting the Foundation: Animal-Welfare.Org

In 2013, I undertook the challenging task of setting up the Animal Welfare Org website, in an attempt to stop animal cruelty, by education. This venture had a very steep learning curve, both fundamentally and technically. However, it also revealed valuable lessons.

Key Lessons and Insights

From this experience, I learned:

• Transitioning to vegetarianism was a step forward, but not enough.
• ‘Animal welfare’ still enables animal cruelty (think RSPCA Freedom Food, Red Tractor, Grass Fed and all the highly misleading advertising.
• 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.

A New Chapter: Cruelty-Free Lifestyle

Learning from these insights, I launched the second iteration of my journey, the Cruelty-Free Lifestyle website. The necessity for continuous innovation, providing cruelty-free alternatives, and the need to generate revenue to maintain the website all played a part in shaping this next website.

My goals were;

• I had to provide a viable alternative to products that cause animal cruelty.
• I needed to monetise my site to pay for running expenses (see ‘Affiliate Disclosure’).
• I didn’t have the capital to set up a buy/sell operation (ironically, I turned that challenge into this successful Vegan Shopping Centre business model)
• I had to research vegan and cruelty free products and then find the business that sold these products in the UK (easier said than done!)
• Some sites were advertising ‘Get all your vegan products here’ and yet they were selling ‘ethical’ meat alongside  – (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 data because suppliers updated them periodically, resulting in those annoying ‘Page Not Found’ errors. This resulted in a poor user experience.

Overcoming hurdles like these and learning to be a competent webmaster became a part of the journey. I wasn’t going to let these problems stop me. I’ve always loved a challenge, and the solution was obvious.

The Birth of Vegan Supermarket UK

The challenges I encountered only strengthened my resolve. Thus, Vegan Supermarket UK was born.

I continued my education in the complex world of SEO trends, continued aligning with trusted suppliers of vegan and cruelty-free products, and creating a trusted portal where busy ethical shoppers could find all the vegan products they need – in one place.

Our Mission

What began as a personal goal has now become a passionate business commitment to provide the very best vegan shopping experience, while always maintaining our core animal rights values.

Although it’s still a passionate endeavour, the positive response from our early customers shows that we are on the right commercial path.

How To Help Us (to help animals)

Once we have referred a customer to these recommended businesses, some might argue that the customer has no need to return to our website, but that’s not correct, for the following reasons;

There are many reasons to shop through us!

• The businesses we refer you to, don’t have the full range of vegan and cruelty free products that we have here!
• We rely on you shopping through us because we are reader supported (please see our affiliate disclosure), and that means we can keep innovating and bringing you the best vegan shopping centre 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 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.

We are very excited about the journey that lies ahead!

Brian Muskett
Founder: Vegan Supermarket UK