Blue Rinse is one of Leeds few independent retailers that sell mostly vintage and secondhand items including secondhand faux fur coats. We never intentionally sell real animal fur although it seems that a small number of items have slipped through in this case.

The offending items were immediately removed from the shop after reading this article. We hope this move shows our commitment to ethical issues and hope to prove that we never knowingly sell items that will cause offence.

The said items were with a rail of faux fur products that we have been selling and were labelled as fux fur as that is what we believed them to be. The way our business works is by buying a bulk lot of one particular item, in this case secondhand used faux fur coats, and it is sometimes possible that a number of slightly different products can slip through. While we regret that this has happened we hope to make it clear that his kind of incident is accidental and we do not encourage animal cruelty.

While I do not know who posted this article or provided the information, I am slightly disappointed that we were not informed immediately of this incident. Whoever visited the shop to do the research obviously knows a lot more about real fur than we do and can better tell the difference between real and fake than we can, so it could've been helpful for all for us to be informed straight away that we were selling animal fur. In that case, the items could have been removed much earlier to avoid this situation and also maybe even given us a bit of advice for the future to help us avoid any similar items passing through into our shop.

Despite the comments about us selling fascist white power badges in the past not being relevant to the dialogue about animal fur I would like to give a balanced view seen as though it has been mentioned. For similar reasons as to how the fur itmes slipped through, we bought a batch of about 5000 old patches in which we found a small number of the white power badge in and amongst. We went through this batch thoroughly to remove the items that may have caused offence but clearly a small number were missed by mistake.

I hope the reader can understand that while we do our very best to ensure we do not sell items intentionally that will cause offence, we are at the end of the day human and sometimes mistakes like this do happen. All we can do is apologise for these and act quickly, as we have done with the removal of the fur items and in return ask that we are consulted initially if somebody takes offence to something we sell so it can be dealt with straight away rather causing more offence to others.

As I have said, we are one of few remaining independent shops in Leeds with an independent voice so it does bother us a lot when we read things like this. I hope this reply has gone a long way to show we do care about a lot of issues and do make a conscious effort to do business ethically.

Dominic
Blue Rinse

Thanks for the quick reply and making the ethical choice.

If you manage to read this, we will get a member of the local animal rights group to come in and arrange to speak to whoever's best about how to detect real fur.

All the best,
NARA.