“Hey Sbri, I love this purse - but can you make it in vegan leather?” – is a question that lands in our inbox from time to time. We’re a leather accessories brand with a sustainable focus, offering beautifully handmade colourful personalised bags and purses (and more!) that aim to make a big impact on your mood but a small one on the planet. From our materials to our production methods, packaging and beyond, we consider our environmental footprint at every step and try to run our small business in the most sustainable way we can. 

So why don’t Sbri offer a vegan alternative to leather, when the vegan lifestyle is so heavily associated with sustainability? It’s a big topic, one that we’ve already covered in this blog post asking how sustainable is leather, and this blog post debunking 5 myths about sustainable fashion. In today’s post we wanted to break it down a bit more and share three reasons why we don’t currently work with vegan leather at Sbri. We’re going to discuss whether vegan leather is good for the planet, whether vegan leather is sustainable and why we’re dubious of the term “vegan” to describe it at all. Let’s get into it…

As we write this, it’s the day of the autumn equinox here in the UK, the temperature in Ringwood has dropped to 16 degrees and the chunky knits and (gasp!) jeans have started to make an appearance with the team in the studio. All of this can only mean one thing: autumn has officially arrived. 

It’s no secret that we love sunshine and summer brights at Sbri (just take a look at our colourful coin purses and holiday travel accessories) but we are very ready for this new season and are here to help you find the joy in everyday (even the cold ones!), instead of wishing the year away. In this blog post we’ve rounded up our favourite fall must-haves and product recommendations from lovely British small businesses to help you make the most of your autumn evenings and wet weekends. Let’s get to it.

It’s June, the sun is shining (sometimes) and festivals are back, baby. Festivals: the epitome of the joyful feeling we’re always searching for at Sbri, tied up in a mud splattered, glitter covered bow. What could be better?

For this blog post we asked our resident festival expert Carla, our marketing and graphic designer, for some advice and recommendations for first-time festival goers. Carla is a Somerset-girl and she’s been to every Glastonbury festival since 2005 (plus a fair few other festivals in between) so she’s got a lot of know-how and stories to tell. 

We’re proud to be a sustainable small business so we asked Carla for her thoughts on these two topics specifically - read on for top tips on how to have an eco-friendly festival experience, and her festival must-have recommendations from UK small businesses. AKA, how to do festivals the sbri way. Here’s what she said…

There are always so many things we want to tell you about Sbri - from the intricate designs and ideas behind our personalised products to our sustainable business values and where and how we make our leather accessories. So many cool things, in fact, that there are enough for every letter of the alphabet. 

If you’re anything like us, it’s probably important to you to know a bit about the small business you’re buying from before you commit your hard earned pennies, so we are here to help. This is the A-Z of Sbri: the ultimate Sbri fact file, filled with all the info nuggets you need to know about what goes on in the Sbri Studio.

If you’ve ever shopped at Sbri, followed @sbri_studio or just happened upon our website in a magic twist of fate, chances are you’ve heard us chat about the ‘S’ word a fair bit, the ‘S’ word being sustainability. Being a sustainable leather brand was never a question for us, we knew that if we were going to be making fun leather accessories it had to be fun and fair for everyone, including our planet (cos we’ve only got one). You can read all about our sustainability practices here, including information about the natural materials we use and how we run our leather studio. 

As well as offering our customers gorgeous, UK made personalised purses and accessories we try to encourage them to learn about what’s in their new garment, how it was made, where and by who - important questions we should all be asking every time we shop. We know that shopping sustainably in day-to-day life can be overwhelming and it’s almost impossible to do it perfectly, but we’d love for it to become more accessible. In this post we’re going to try and debunk 5 common assumptions and misconceptions about sustainable fashion so that you can hopefully start to think about it in a different way.

Who you gonna call? Myth busters.

Read all about it! Sbri hit the press last year which was a super exciting milestone for us. As a small business there’s nothing more exciting than flicking through a newspaper in the supermarket or turning on the television to find our products in the spotlight. There are lots of hats to wear and plates to spin when you’re a small team running a small business, so we were totally thrilled to have achieved coverage in magazines, newspapers, online and on TV in our first year of trying on a PR hat.

In case you missed it, read on to discover the four Sbri pieces approved by the press…