About Us

History - From Our Founder

It was in 2001 when I entered the workforce as a Management Assistant for the City of Los Angeles. The position demanded that I wear professional work attire including at times, a suit.  With professional attire came the need for shoes, belts, wallets and briefcases that fit the part. Over the years I purchased several items from vegan stores across the US. During those years, vegan leather items were made from PU or worse, PVC. While finding the right look was a challenge, finding the quality was impossible. My belts and shoes would eventually crack and peel no matter how much or how little I paid for them.

In 2005, I started business school at USC. For one of my projects during an entrepreneurship course, I studied the feasibility of creating a vegan line of shoes and accessories. When I graduated business school, it was 2008 and with the economy in shambles, I decided that it would be safest to go back to the City of Los Angeles where I continued to work. Still, the idea of creating Doshi rested in the back of my mind. Years later, wanting to make my life more meaningful, I acted on the idea and started work to launch the brand and in 2017, Doshi was launched after years of learning about materials, hardware, manufacturing, prototyping, importing, warehousing, and ecommerce.

It was a long road but ultimately one that lead to the creation of a brand that provides value. We seek to provide our customers fashionable products that combine durable, vegan, and eco-friendly materials with quality workmanship.

In 2024, we started an initiative that we call becoming the Luxury UnBrand. In our desire to provide customers with value and to spread the adoption of vegan and sustainable products, we will attempt to offer our lowest prices when a product is first launched. Imagine having the great fashion imbued with quality at an affordable price. I believe that this is the best path for us to have an opportunity to bring innovative materials to everyday people.

-Paras

What We Do

Doshi was founded to provide smart, fashionable, and quality vegan bags and accessories to people who have ethical, religious or environmental beliefs that lead them to seek vegan products. Our goal is to meet the needs of smart, socially and environmentally conscious professionals, jet-setters and fashionistas. Our product offerings include non-leather (vegan leather) handbags, briefcases, backpacks, belts, and wallets.

We are based in southern California but we'd like to think that we're not just part of just one city, state, or even country.  We want to be a part of lives in every place that people share our ideals for a better world. We believe that's everywhere.

What Makes Us Different? Intention.

Unlike an accidentally vegan product that was made as cheaper alternative to a leather product, Doshi seeks to set the standard in luxury vegan fashion. Setting the standard includes a heavy focus on design, materials, hardware, and craftsmanship.

Our founder, Paras, oversees the design of products, picks out the materials, and directly works with factories to make intentionally vegan goods for vegan and vegan friendly customers.

Intentionally Vegan Design: We study trends, consult designers, and keep an awareness of the marketplace to make sure that our products keep you up to date.

Intentionally Vegan Materials: When Paras realized that ordinary PU was an inferior material, he set out to find the best vegan materials. Most companies talk about using "high quality PU" for their vegan leather.  The phrase doesn't mean too much.  Paras spent years researching where the best vegan materials come from. Doshi does not use ordinary PU in any of its products.

Intentionally Vegan Manufacturing: Vegan products don't stop at materials. Our partner factories know that our products need to be vegan from top to bottom. All glues, thread, structural materials, interlining, and hardware are 100% vegan. No animal products are used in our goods whatsoever.

Intentionally Connected: We support several vegan organizations from those pushing forward animals rights to farm sanctuaries taking care of our non human friends.

Our Founder:

Paras Doshi

Paras grew up in sunny southern California and worked for the City of Los Angeles for 17 years before leaving to pursue his mission to provide quality, fashionable, vegan bags and accessories to the world. Paras has donated and raised money for pro animal non-profits and animal sanctuaries over the years. He grew up vegetarian and became vegan in 2012. 

Paras first confronted the issue of finding vegan accessories in 2001 when he started his first job. The difficulty with finding classy, fashionable, and durable vegan accessories persisted over the years no matter how many brands he tried. Eventually Paras decided to venture out and start Doshi to address this need. Doshi launched in 2017 and Paras has been working on delivering this idea of classy, fashionable, and quality non-leather goods ever since.

Paras holds a B.S. Finance degree from California Polytechnic University, Pomona and an MBA from the University of Southern California.

An audio interview with Paras, December 2020: https://plantbasedprofitsshow.com/paras-doshi/

An audio interview with Paras, September 2022: Hope For The Animals Podcast by Hope Bohanec

An interview with Paras, September 2023: CHARM - Celebrating Heroes in the Animal Rights Movement

In case you're wondering, Markus, the cute little Boston Terrier belongs to Byron, a friend who was living up in Vancouver. Byron graciously allowed Paras to stay with him while Doshi was attending the Vegan Expo in 2019. Markus and Paras became buddies while Paras was up there. Markus might be the happiest dog around.

Our Products:

We design our products to be practical and useful, we choose materials and construction methods that are meant to hold up to frequent use, we pay our suppliers for the more difficult work we demand, and we stand behind our goods. Eco-friendliness and sustainability are a function of how long a product lasts and what materials it's made from.  We will continue to push on every frontier until we make beautiful products that are beautiful, last long, and then disappear back into the earth when we are done using them. We have to do all of this while providing our customers value. To improve the world, our products need to be accessible to everyone; not just a select few.

Prototypes get a workout before going to production. They're scratched, dropped, tugged on, and pulled. We test pockets, zippers, slots and handles. We often have multiple rounds of revisions which cause our suppliers to have fits but we like finding problems... so you don't.

Factories:

We visit the factories where we manufacture goods. We look for clean factories where we ask terrible amounts of questions to management to understand product construction, environmental practices and workers' well being.

Factories in the places we manufacture often have a variety of certifications to show social compliance. One of the most common is the Business and Social Compliance Initiative (http://www.saasaccreditation.org/bsci) certification.  We are pushing to have each factory BSCI audited. BSCI is not a certification or accreditation. It is a methodology that allows for factories to be social compliance audited which in turn helps to improve working conditions for companies within the supply chain.

Doshi and the Environment:

When we set about to make a product, we consider the materials being used, how the product is being made and look to find ways that we can make the product last. Synthetic materials have made huge strides in minimizing the resources used to create them.  We do our best to find factories that purchase recycled base material and minimize the use of chemicals and solvents when making their materials.

Why not leather?  Isn't it just a by product?

Studies show that the source of a great deal of the world's pollution comes from livestock.  It's not the animals' fault. Humans just breed too many of them.  The lifecycle of a cow involves great deals of resource consumption and waste production. From our reading, studies and back of the envelope calculations, we believe that the carbon footprint needed to produce a bag or backpack from synthetic materials is vastly smaller than what is needed to produce the same bag using an equivalent amount of leather. Further, much of the leather found in mass produced goods is treated with petroleum based compounds at every step, from tanning to it's final finish.

Ok, that's our part.  Here's your part:

We hope that when you buy our products, you'll use them often so that what we take from the environment is used to its fullest. When you're done with our products, please donate them so that others may put them to good use.

Links:

Animal Agriculture and the environment:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/study-claims-meat-creates-half-of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html

http://www.takepart.com/video/2015/05/29/leather-pollution

http://www.utne.com/environment/the-true-cost-of-leather

https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/leather-and-the-environment.html

http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/asia-india-toxic-pollution-leather-industry-health-problems

 https://hopefortheanimalspodcast.org/episode-64-vegan-belts-pineapple-wallets-and-leather-free-footballs/

http://blog.doshi.shop/