Inside Shop Like You Give a Damn - Sustainable Fashion

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SHOP LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN
*A Department Store for the Future of Compassion

written AMANDA MORTENSON

The idea of Shop Like You Give a Damn began with a refusal to overlook the small decisions that shape the world. Founded by Alex Jansen, Kim van Laar, and Stephan Stegeman, the platform has become Europe’s largest 100% vegan online department store for fair and sustainable fashion, cosmetics, and home essentials.

Within its growing catalogue of over twenty thousand items, the brand builds a quiet revolution rooted in clarity, responsibility, and care. Stephan speaks with composure and focus, describing the company as a living structure guided by values rather than trends. “We wanted to prove that business can be an act of empathy,” he says. “That every product we offer should reflect the respect we owe to each other and to the planet.”
The rhythm of the platform feels architectural — modular yet human — designed to filter choices by ethics, materials, and certifications. Shoppers move through an ecosystem that speaks the language of transparency. “We give people tools to shop more mindfully, to slow down consumption without giving up the joy of beautiful things,” Stephan explains. The platform’s success feels less like growth and more like accumulation of intention, each decision forming another layer of meaning.

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: Kings of Indigo

Shop Like You Give A Damn
founding team: Kim van Laar, Stephan Stegeman, and Alex Jansen

Amanda Mortenson
What was the first spark that led you to create Shop Like You Give a Damn?

Stephan Stegeman
It started with the realisation that shopping consciously often felt like navigating a maze. You’d spend hours trying to find brands that aligned with your values, only to discover hidden compromises in materials or production. We wanted to change that. The goal was to build a space where people could find everything they need — clothing, cosmetics, home products — knowing that each choice respects both humans and animals. It’s not about perfection, it’s about creating access and clarity, and proving that compassion can be part of commerce.

How would you describe the essence of the platform today?

It’s a digital department store built entirely on ethics, but it’s also a growing community. We bring together consumers and brands who share the same mindset: wanting to make a positive impact without losing sight of style, comfort, and emotion. Our filters and categories help people align their purchases with their personal values. It’s a tool for awareness, but also for enjoyment — we want people to feel good about what they buy and to understand the story behind it.

What guides your team when choosing which brands to include?

Our curation is grounded in five ethical and sustainability values. We study each brand carefully, not only for certifications but for how they treat people and the environment. We talk with founders, we read between the lines of their production processes. Trust is crucial, because transparency can only exist when both sides are genuinely aligned. We want brands that live their values every day, not only talk about them in marketing terms.

How do you see the role of design in ethical consumption?

Design is language. It communicates who you are and what you believe without words. When used responsibly, design becomes a moral act — it helps people connect with values intuitively. It’s not only about making something attractive, but about making it meaningful. Good design doesn’t preach; it offers presence. It reminds us that what we hold and wear carries consequence.

Your catalogue is large and diverse. How do you keep coherence across so many products?

By holding on to clarity in our criteria and culture. Everything we add must resonate with our mission. The coherence comes from conviction. We created a system where every product, no matter how small, passes through the same ethical framework. That consistency allows us to expand while keeping our integrity intact. Even when we introduce something new, the foundation remains the same — it’s built on care, responsibility, and honesty.

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: Saye

The structure of Shop Like You Give a Damn moves like a living organism, layers of product, purpose, and technology work together in balance. The catalogue now includes fashion, cosmetics, and home essentials, forming a world where beauty is measured by impact as much as appearance. Each page reads like a quiet manifesto of possibility, where the act of shopping becomes a reflection of belief. Stephan describes the process of building the platform as analytical and emotional. “You need to keep your system clear enough to scale, but soft enough to feel human,” he says. The filters, the certifications, the storytelling — all function like organs inside a single body, each serving the same ethical pulse.

The brand’s message—Shop with compassion, no more than you need—acts as its rhythm. It sets a slower tempo for digital consumption, one grounded in curiosity rather than excess. Every collection moves through this calm consistency, their products are not staged as symbols of virtue but as evidence that empathy and commerce can coexist without contradiction.

In the end, Shop Like You Give a Damn creates an atmosphere of quiet confidence, it offers not an alternative, but an evolution — a model for how values can take shape through practice and precision, through what Stephan calls “a persistent attention to the small details that make life fairer.”

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: Avani

What does compassion mean to you in a business context?

To me, compassion is about seeing the full circle of impact — how your actions affect people, animals, and the planet. It’s not an abstract idea; it’s a practice of awareness. Compassion requires discipline. It means asking hard questions, taking responsibility when things go wrong, and staying open when change is needed. In business, compassion means creating systems that value wellbeing over speed and choosing partnerships that strengthen that mindset.

How do you maintain motivation in an industry that still relies on fast production?

We stay motivated by focusing on progress rather than frustration. Change doesn’t happen through confrontation but through persistence. Every time we collaborate with a new brand, every customer who makes a conscious choice — it proves that the shift is happening. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by how big the system is, but when you zoom in, you see thousands of small, positive steps being made every day. That gives energy to keep going.

What role does education play for your customers?

Education is everything. But we try to approach it in a way that feels empowering, not moralising. People want to make better choices; they just need clarity and trust. That’s why we designed our platform to be intuitive, to help them understand materials, origins, and certifications in a visual, accessible way. Education works when it feels like discovery — when people realise they have the power to influence the world simply by adjusting their daily decisions.

What makes you proud when you look at what you’ve built so far?

The community, absolutely. Seeing so many people connecting through shared values gives me a deep sense of hope. Each order, each message, each new brand that joins — it’s proof that empathy has a place in business. I’m proud that we’ve created something that feels kind without being passive, a space that encourages action and curiosity. The real success is seeing people take ownership of the idea and make it their own.

How do you imagine the future of Shop Like You Give a Damn?

The future is collective. I imagine a network of people, designers, and brands working together toward the same goal — reducing harm while amplifying beauty. I see our platform expanding in reach and depth, but always staying grounded in its values. Growth only makes sense when it strengthens connection. I want the company to remain a living example that kindness and business can share the same language and thrive within it.

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: KUYICHI CORE

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: Botma Bennekom

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: Arze

SHOP LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN
www.shoplikeyougiveadamn.com

based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
offering over 20,000 vegan, fair and sustainable products

Shop Like You Give a Damn stands as platform and practice, a framework for mindful consumption that invites people to move through the world with clarity and care. The company builds a slow architecture of ethics — not through grand gestures, but through steady repetition of values. What Stephan and his team have created feels less like a store and more like a living proof that responsibility, when practiced with patience, becomes design itself.

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: Nuuwaï

Shop Like You Give A Damn
brand: MoEa

LUNETTES Selection Berlin - Vintage Eyewear

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The LUNETTES SELECTION Experience
*Vintage Eyes, Modern Rituals

written AMANDA MORTENSON

In the quiet hum of a Berlin street, a visitor steps into LUNETTES SELECTION and enters a different time. Eyeglasses carry identity, memory, and design. Since its founding, LUNETTES SELECTION has built a world where frames communicate, spaces respond, and vision unfolds as a poetic act.

LUNETTES SELECTION emerged from a pursuit almost cinematic in its specificity: to find frames that do not yet exist in one’s wardrobe, to uncover exceptions. Its archive of never-worn vintage eyewear — salvaged from opticians’ inventories and manufacturers’ storerooms — constitutes a measured museum of form. Each piece acts as an invitation, in Berlin and across other cities, LUNETTES SELECTION gathers collectors, costume designers, and seekers of individuality who explore its “archive eyewear” with a sense of ceremony.

In 2011, LUNETTES SELECTION introduced its own line, the LUNETTES Kollektion, conceived in Berlin, handcrafted in Italy. These frames, realised in Mazzucchelli cellulose acetate, bear the same reverence for material, color, and detail that animates the vintage curation. The collection progresses with quiet confidence, never loud, tethered always to vision as a personal narrative.

LUNETTES SELECTION extends beyond eyewear into the experience between object and wearer, between object and space. Its Berlin boutiques in Mitte, Charlottenburg, and Prenzlauer Berg exist as stages for vision and interior. Each location carries shared elements—linoleum floors, a tactile palette in harmony with acetate tones—and reveals its own architecture of encounter.

The Charlottenburg store, realized by designer Oskar Kohnen, functions like a refined mise-en-scène. A pastel-green apothecary cabinet climbs to the ceiling, drawers that invite curiosity and discretion. A white-cube shell frames iconographic furnishings: a Hank Kwint side table, a Jacques Adnet rolling cart, two Pierre Paulin “Butterfly” chairs. Underfoot, restored 1970s marble floors gleam, while a sculptural lamp by Sebastian Summa asserts presence without dominance. The atmosphere carries poetry and precision, forming an architectural lens for viewing eyewear.
At the Torstrasse location, Kohnen’s transformation creates a chamber of wonder. The space unfolds as a blue-toned dialogue, where frame histories appear as curated curiosities. Marienburgerstrasse’s boutique, defined by polished concrete, card catalog–style cabinets, and vintage lighting, presents a cinematic rhythm.

Behind every frame is an eye test conducted with care and LUNETTES SELECTION reclaims the slower, handwritten craft of subjective refraction, inviting patrons into a relation with their own perception. This act aligns with the brand’s ethos that intimacy with the instrument of vision is itself part of the aesthetic.

Through its Journal, LUNETTES SELECTION narrates alliances — with makers, artists, stories. Highlights from Petites Lunettes, its children’s eyewear initiative, appear beside collaborations, archival essays, and explorations of optical heritage. The text gestures outward, placing LUNETTES in dialogue with design, film, even myopia management.

The brand speaks through calm precision, it listens, collects, edits, and opens space. Within this dialogue between object and subject, LUNETTES SELECTION shapes a quiet insistence, choosing how we see becomes a reflection.

Stepping outside, the visitor carries a trace of the place — a resonance where design, history, and vision meet. LUNETTES SELECTION exists as an interface, curated and alive to the gaze. Enjoy Yourself!

LUNETTES SELECTION Vintage and Handmade Eyewear www.lunettes-selection.de

Locations: Torstrasse 172 | Marienburgerstrasse 11 | Bleibtreustrasse 55, Berlin / Prices range from Optical frames €280, sunglasses €320, vintage archive pieces from €220.

WHITE Milano September 2025

Inside WHITE Milano 2025
*New Visions, Emerging Voices, Global Connections

WHITE Milano returns to the Tortona Fashion District from September 25 to 28, reaffirming its role as a stage where the global fashion system meets craft, research, and identity.

With 364 exhibitors, supported by partnerships with institutions such as MAECI, ICE, the Municipality of Milan, and the Lombardy Region, the exhibition creates a vision of the Spring/Summer 2026 season that is anchored in innovation and guided by sustainability. Its direction is international and precise, reaching into new markets and strengthening Milan’s position as the place where creative languages converge.

WHITE Milano
2025 September Edition
Brand CLARA PINTO

WHITE Milano
2025 September Edition
Brand CHŪNCHÉN

The theme of this edition develops through new structures and projects, among them the inaugural RLC Fashion Summit at MUDEC on September 25, an invitation-only gathering that brings together leaders from fashion, retail, and luxury. It reflects the ambition of WHITE to act as marketplace and laboratory, aligning commercial exchange with broader dialogues about the structural shifts shaping the industry. Alongside the summit, initiatives such as ExpoWHITE, Inside White, and WHITE Resort expand the exhibition’s perimeter, offering spaces that showcase cross-cultural creativity, resort and leisure fashion, and experimental approaches to design. Secret Rooms once again highlight talent through an immersive format, placing the focus on identities that carry strong aesthetic signatures and cultural depth.

In this atmosphere, certain presences define the pulse of the edition. CLARA PINTO is a London-based brand exploring innovation through traditional wool felting techniques. Founded in 2019, it has gained international recognition for its sculptural, material-driven approach, reinterpreting the role of wool in contemporary design through craftsmanship rather than technology. From Colombia, Manuela Alvarez continues her path of building bridges between ancestral handwork and global design, and her collaboration with Adidas extends this narrative into a sphere where artisanal codes merge with the technical imagination of sportswear. The result is a dialogue that amplifies the voice of independent craftsmanship and the reach of global production, presented within the context of WHITE’s curatorial stage.

Scandinavian presence finds expression in RENÉ Copenhagen, founded by Jens Skov Østergaard, whose voluminous silhouettes and fluid tailoring channel a sensibility that draws on heritage while projecting forward with utilitarian clarity. The brand’s aesthetic enters Milan with strength, expanding the exhibition’s geography while affirming the role of Copenhagen as an epicenter of cultural fashion energy. Italian craft is given a distinct accent through RIEN Studio, which has chosen to concentrate on a single product, a shoe that merges the function of a slipper with the elegance of a design object. Its appearance at WHITE Resort emphasizes how simplicity, when mastered, can define a whole vocabulary of style. HIDESINS adds a different tone, presenting a collection marked by architectural volumes, material experimentation, and a sense of power in silhouette, reinforcing the importance of bold design languages in shaping the visual direction of the season. Joining from Asia, CHŪNCHÉN introduces garments conceived with precision and material awareness, extending the reach of the fair into a new cultural horizon and giving voice to a rising creative identity with strong narrative depth.

WHITE Milano
2025 September Edition
Brand HIDESINS

WHITE Milano
2025 September Edition
Brand MAZ MANUELA ALVAREZ x ADIDAS

WHITE Milano
2025 September Edition
Brand SPEKTRE

These presences coexist with an extensive program that includes Spanish, Indian, Armenian, Brazilian, Romanian, and South African designers, each contributing unique cultural stories that expand the collective vision of the exhibition. At Superstudio, BASE, and other Tortona venues, visitors encounter installations, fashion-art dialogues, and showcases that underline the multiplicity of voices brought together under WHITE. Highlights include the Flavio Lucchini retrospective at the FLA Museum and Roberto Miglietta’s sculptural explorations at BASE, which situate fashion within an expanded artistic framework.

By curating this complex ecosystem, WHITE Milano September 2025 embodies a direction that is curatorial and connective. It stages a landscape where identities as diverse as BAJA, Alvarez with Adidas, RENÉ, RIEN Studio, HIDESINS, and CHUNCHEN take their place among global peers, forming a collective voice that resonates across continents. In doing so, the exhibition affirms its purpose: to be a meeting point where craft, innovation, and vision define the present and shape the future of fashion.

Wildling Shoes - Sustainable Barefoot Shoe

WILDLING
*Ten Years Barefoot in Motion

written SARAH ARENDTS

It all began with a step. Ten years of Wildling. Ten years barefoot, from the very start. Anna and Ran Yona founded the label in Engelskirchen in 2015, reimagining what shoes could be. Shoes that feel like no shoes at all. Unrestricted, agile, radically minimal.

The idea did not emerge from a business plan, it emerged from children running barefoot across tiles, meadows, sand. When the German climate demanded sturdier shoes, there were no models that gave the same freedom. So Anna and Ran built them. A wooden last shaped from their daughter’s foot, a designer sketching from afar, a small factory in Portugal producing the first prototype. A crowdfunding campaign brought the first pairs to life. And quickly the question arose: could this be done for adults too?

Anna and Ran
photo by Dirk Bruniecki

Today, people across the world wear Wildlings. The bestseller Tanuki alone has been sold over half a million times. Yet Wildling has never measured success in numbers. Success here means circularity, regionality, radical transparency. It means partners who want to reshape the textile world from its very roots. Three partnerships embody this vision: Nordwolle, Virgo Coop, and Itoitex. Each one tells of a future built from old knowledge, reimagined. Nordwolle begins in the pastures of northern Germany. Hardy breeds like the Pomeranian Landsheep graze the fields, preserving biodiversity. Their wool was once dismissed as too coarse, too rough. Now it is washed, combed, spun. No dyeing, no bleaching. A material that warms, breathes, and speaks against synthetic fibers, against microplastics, against faceless supply chains. Since 2015 Wildling has used Nordwolle, crafting models like Kindur entirely from it. When shoes are returned, the wool is recycled — a closed loop, rare in footwear.

Virgo Coop works in southern France. Three founders, an old weaving mill, a young team. Reviving the craft of European hemp and linen processing, long abandoned. Machines designed anew prepare the fibers into fine yarns. Hemp grows with little water, no pesticides, enriching the soil as it matures. Wildling invested in Virgo’s machines, helping save the weaving mill. Today, Nordwolle sends fibers to Virgo, and Virgo weaves fabrics in return. A regional cycle, sustaining knowledge once thought lost.

And then Itoitex. Two emails crossing paths — one from Germany, one from Japan. Anna Yona and Mr. Itoi recognized a shared possibility in Washi paper. Traditional Japanese paper, refined into yarn. Wrapped around a polyester core, woven into fabric. Lightweight, breathable, antibacterial. From it came the Tanuki. A shoe with a thin, flexible sole, inspired by Japanese Tabi footwear. A design that connects the body to the ground, it´s a symbol of cultural exchange and the courage of improbable ideas.

Anna and Ran
photo by Sarah Pabst

photo by Lisa Pitz

Ten years of Wildling means ten years of radical textile research. Wool from Rügen, hemp from southern France, paper yarn from Japan. Each material is part of a larger story. A story about circular economies, collective innovation, and textile self-determination in Europe and beyond. A story about footwear as a vessel of vision, carrying ideas of how to live with the earth.

Wildling remains barefoot. From the beginning. And for the future.

discover more www.wildling.shoes

RESLIDES - Modular Slides

RESLIDES
*Modular Slides for a World in Flux

written AMANDA MORTENSON

RESLIDES arrives from Zurich with clear intent, a lucid system for feet and pace, authored by designer Benno Reichard and released to the public in Spring 2025. The project speaks in clean lines and steady rhythm, offering footwear as an editable experience and style as a living practice.

The brand presents a commons of fashion-conscious people who move through daily life with self-determination, who treat the planet with care and curiosity, and who welcome new ideas for living and consuming in a constant state of flux.

The message lands with clarity; DIVERSE – ADAPTABLE – SELF-DETERMINED. A pair of RESLIDES enters the wardrobe either pre-assembled and ready to walk or delivered as a kit for hands that enjoy process, order, and the small ceremony of building. Each element carries longevity in its brief. Components fit, refit, and return to service with ease, and the design welcomes repeated touch. Uppers and straps drop in regular waves through collaborations with artists, designers, and like-minded brands, turning the slide into a platform for edits, experiments, and mood shifts that follow the body through a day, a week, a season.

(c) pictures by Johanna Saxen

RESLIDES modular slides

The formal language orients on Dieter Rams principles and holds a timeless posture. Edges read calm, proportions feel balanced, and the silhouette glides through studio floors, café tiles, summer concrete, quiet corridors, garden paths. The wearer becomes an editor of detail: a textured upper for evening air, a monochrome strap for a stripped-back moment, a pattern that hums through errands and conversation. The system encourages change through choice, and choice arrives through parts that click into place with reassuring precision.

MODULAR – DURABLE – CIRCULAR. RESLIDES runs on update culture. Straps and uppers rotate, repair unfolds with purpose, and retired components loop back to the brand with rewards that close the circle. The promise is simple: material stays in play, style continues, waste loses its spotlight. A slide becomes a toolkit for personal evolution, and every selection writes another line in a growing archive. The act of exchange—one strap for another, one upper for a new texture—feels immediate and grounded, a small action with a steady consequence.

The community sits at the center. RESLIDES gathers people who claim their taste with confidence and craft, who enjoy a design that listens and responds. The brand talks in the first person plural for a reason; the project lives through shared choices, through images and gestures that pass from one pair of hands to another. The visual world surrounding the footwear stays close to real rooms and lived moments. The rhythm continues on Instagram at @reslides.official where fragments and process offer a window into the practice.

For those seeking a clear entrance, explore modular slides at RESLIDES. The site opens the system, the kit, the ready-to-wear path, the collaborations, and the return cycle that keeps materials moving through many lives. A wardrobe gains a living instrument: build, adjust, repeat, document, evolve. Each pair becomes a working notebook, each strap a fresh line, each return a quiet affirmation of care.

(c) pictures by Johanna Saxen

(c) pictures by Johanna Saxen

(c) pictures by Johanna Saxen

Zurich gave the project its first pulse and Spring 2025 the first release, yet the rhythm already escapes time and place, carried forward through the people who wear and rewear, who assemble and disassemble, who send parts back and wait for the next drop, who treat the slide as an ongoing conversation between body and object, surface and ground, past step and next step. RESLIDES is less an item to be owned than a process to be lived, a modular cadence where every exchange of straps and uppers becomes a gesture of care, every return a small ritual in circular design, and every walk a reminder that fashion can remain open, responsive, generous. Update over waste, and movement writes the rest. Enjoy yourself!

discover more www.reslides.ch

pos.sei.mo - Sustainable Luxury Knitwear

pos.sei.mo
*Crafting Timeless Knitwear

written SARAH ARENDTS

The German knitwear brand pos.sei.mo builds its identity on rare natural fibers, refined craftsmanship, and a clear commitment to sustainability. Every collection is shaped by the idea that luxury can coexist with responsibility, creating garments that are precious and enduring.

The name pos.sei.mo brings together three materials that define the brand’s essence: possum, silk, merino. These fibers, often blended with cashmere, set the tone for the distinctive softness and resilience of the collections. The story began with a dedication to natural yarns and the decision to work with partners who share the same values. Early collaborations with Woolyarns in New Zealand established a foundation of trust and access to high-quality, ethically sourced fibers.

Production is anchored in Germany and the EU, where skilled workshops apply traditional and advanced knitting methods. Techniques such as Seamless Knitting and Fully Fashioned enable precise shaping, minimal waste, and garments that carry the signature of careful craftsmanship.

pos.sei.mo presents knitwear as a long-term companion. The brand pursues an approach that emphasizes continuity, thoughtful design, and accountability across every step of creation. A garment is envisioned for its moment of purchase and for years of use, with a focus on maintaining beauty and function over time.

This philosophy is extended through the Cashmere Spa, an in-house service for garment care and repair. By offering professional maintenance, the brand ensures that treasured pieces remain part of daily life for as long as possible. This service reflects a holistic vision: production and aftercare are inseparable elements of sustainable fashion.

Each collection reflects a dedication to elegance and refinement through knitwear. Fibers such as possum, silk, merino, and cashmere are chosen for their natural qualities and combined in innovative blends. Seamless construction techniques result in garments that feel fluid on the body, while Fully Fashioned knitting shapes each piece with precision.

Design language is rooted in clarity and timelessness. Natural and earthy tones dominate the palette, often complemented by muted neutrals that highlight the quality of the fiber itself. Silhouettes range from classic turtlenecks to draped cardigans, ponchos, and finely crafted scarves, all conceived to integrate effortlessly into a wardrobe.

Every stage of the pos.sei.mo process follows a consistent principle of responsibility. Fibers are sourced under strict environmental and animal welfare standards in New Zealand. Production takes place within Europe, allowing close oversight and fair working conditions. Knitting technologies reduce excess material, aligning efficiency with quality. By encouraging customers to renew and care for garments through the Cashmere Spa, pos.sei.mo adds another layer of responsibility to its practice.

pos.sei.mo represents an understanding of fashion as cultural craftsmanship. Each piece is both a product and a statement of values, shaped by a respect for natural resources, for skilled artisans, and for the wearer. The brand continues to expand its presence while staying true to its roots: fibers from New Zealand, European design aesthetics, and a dedication to sustainable luxury. Through its collections, pos.sei.mo demonstrates that knitwear can embody refinement, durability, and care. The vision is clear—garments created with integrity, carried forward with responsibility, and treasured across generations.

all images (c) pos.sei.mo
discover more www.posseimo.de