Everyone knows how horrendous it can be, schlepping from store to store trying to find the right pair of shoes. Imagine what that’s like for vegetarians and vegans.
Even most vinyl or fabric shoes utilize glue made from slaughterhouse by-products — that is, animal parts. So animal-friendly shoe-shopping, or even browsing, is all pressure and no pleasure. Until, that is, Sudo Shoes opened in Porter Square this fall.
“Myself and everyone I know who is vegan or vegetarian goes crazy trying to find shoes,” says Sudo Shoes owner Scot Fitzsimmons. “It’s a great injustice that vegetarians and vegans can’t dress how they want.”
Like “normal people”? We can’t resist teasing him for hesitating.
“Exactly, like normal people,” Fitzsimmons laughs.
For this 40-year-old longtime vegetarian, it’s about walking it like he talks it. So he opened Boston’s first truly vegan shoe store, where all products are made without using animals.
Sudo Shoes isn’t just animal-friendly. Brands are sourced that are environmentally sound and fair-labor friendly, too.
“We wouldn’t use anything not made in union factories or by a company that dumps stuff in a river,” Fitzsimmons says.
Since opening this fall, business has been good, too.
“People were eager for us to open. That could be because we opened two months after we said we would,” jokes Fitzsimmons.
Sudo Shoes
1771 Mass. Ave.,
Cambridge, 617-354-1771
www.sudoshoes.com
