Someone from Manolo Blahnik went into my shop and said: 'These shoes are not vegetarian.' That's the highest compliment, because you just can't tell that they are, and they are. My mum taught me to have a soul.

I didn't want to be thirtysomething and not know what I was going to do. I was quite afraid of that, there were quite a lot of aimless kids around, in that 'other' side of my life, who didn't really know what to do because they always had a bank balance to fall back on and they were quite lost.

I think it's very wrong to have the mass murder, every single day, of millions of animals.

I literally have meetings at eight o'clock in the morning, and I finish at nine o'clock at night. It sounds pathetic, but I don't even have time to go shopping.

You feel like everyone hates you if you've got a good life, now I feel maybe it's allowed because I've had my share of sadness.

The really great thing about my shoe store is that there's not one dead animal in it.

The beliefs I was raised with - to respect animals and to be aware of nature, to understand that we share this planet with other creatures - have had a huge impact on me.