NEWLY ESTABLISHED ONLINE SHOP, BETTY JOY, PROVES ECO-FRIENDLY FASHION IS AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE.
If you’ve ever scoured the high street for a special one-of-a-kind piece and gone home deflated as per at the prospect of the mass-produced garbage seemingly advertised to us as original and ‘one-off’, then look no further than Betty Joy online.
With a distinct love of creativity and originality, this little online boutique illustrates that quality, hand-made products are readily available and, as a bonus, all sold at a reasonable price.
Run by one talented lady (with a little help from her boyfriend) and pioneered in November 2006, Betty Joy has gone from strength to strength with a customer base initially consisting of US residents, now moving over into the UK market, ‘’hopefully one day the hand-made scene will be as big here as it is in the US”.
From a gallery owning mother and architect father, Lucia Kempsey, founder of Betty Joy, prides herself on having creativity running through her veins and courses in college to university have helped develop that creativity even further. Running the business from a ‘little cottage in the North of England’, she delights herself with providing quality, hand-made products to her 17-35 year old online market. Her main aim is to promote these products and prove that they ‘”can be cool and don’t have to involve stuffy church halls and badly knitted sweaters”.
With Oxfam set to face an overhaul by former Topshop director, Jane Sheperdson, and all the
recent high-profiled buzz surrounding products like Anya Hindmarches ‘I’m not a Plastic Bag’ Bag, cruelty-free products are big news and Betty Joy wholly agrees, ‘”in the products that we sell, you can see the creativity. An item from a high street store is probably full of misery and suffering”. Lucia also prices Betty Joy’s products very competitively (shopping totes starting at £18.50) knowing full well how time as a student with a low paid job means every penny counts, even when it comes to ethical fashion, “I know how disappointing it is to find something beautiful in a shop only to look at the price label and realise you can’t afford it” . She wants to demonstrate that cruelty-free fashionable products are available to everyone, quoting the ‘Cutseypoo bears and bunnies’ and ‘Emma Ferguson’s purses’ as a few of her personal favourites from the website.
Betty Joy sells vintage –style accessories, toys, home-wares and jewellery created by both Lucia herself and outside designers believing in the same ethos Betty Joy; ‘having fun with what your doing’. Lucia describes a typical Betty Joy customer to be in search of original one-of-a-kind pieces that want to ‘stand out from the crowd’.
At the moment, Betty Joy sells only online however by the end of the year hopes to go wholesale and hopes for the future include a full range of accessories incorporating some of her own screen printing. Lucia has also set Urban Outfitters, Fred Flare and Paperchase firmly in her sights to stock her products and other small UK companies in order to collaborate with. Get your own eco-friendly shopping tote at www.bettyjoy.co.uk
www.bettyjoy.co.uk