About Us
This brand started by chance, and because we were exhausted.
Before creating any of the designs that now populate the collections, it was just the two of us: Alessio and Matthijs.
We met more than 10 years ago, playing video games and bonding over a shared competitive drive. But offline, our lives were grinding us down. Alessio was working long hours at his parents' luggage store. Matthijs was experiencing burnout working in software development.
We also shared a different kind of frustration. When it all started, we had both been vegan for over seven years, inspired by animal rights activists such as Earthling Ed and Joey Carbstrong, and we knew exactly what animal agriculture looked like... we just didn't feel like we were doing anything about it. We were, well, worn out.
In early 2024, during an offhand conversation, Alessio (probably sick of packing and selling suitcases all day) said it'd be so much easier to ship something like a t-shirt instead, and that stuck with us. When we went looking at the vegan apparel that already existed, we found a problem: most of it just wasn't good. The designs were either ugly, so aggressive you'd never wear them in public, or delivered with surprise fees and flaky prints.
We couldn't find cool vegan t-shirts we actually wanted to wear every day.
So we made our own.
While brainstorming domain names, we landed on Worn Out Vegan. Bit of an "aha" moment: it sounded cool, and it described exactly how we felt then.
Bean there, done that
In the early days, this business was pretty much all we did. We moved in together, worked 60-hour weeks (usually more), poured our hearts into it, and cut every cost we could.
That mostly involved beans. Albert Heijn often ran the 1+1 bonus on brown beans, so we'd lug these around, and basically lived off jar after jar while every spare euro went straight back into the business. Not glamorous, but hey, nothing wrong with beans, we just needed to avoid being in the same room all the time... 💨💨💨
We would spend days staring at the screen, researching, designing, building the website, sending emails, being active on social media, debating on hundreds of things we could improve and then actually doing the work, and also learning along the way that good design isn't just what we personally like. We've been wrong, we've reworked things, and we've gotten better at it over time.
Our diets may be a little less boring these days, but we still have the same drive to continuously build stuff and do more.
Redefining vegan apparel
We're two vegans who get how isolating it can feel at times, living in a non-vegan world: we wanted to make clothing for people who want to take up space and show their identity with confidence.
Subtle activism
Clever, mysterious, sometimes tofu-worshipping designs you'll actually look forward to wearing outside.
Conversation starters
Artwork that makes people curious enough to ask, so that talk you're gonna have about animal rights starts on a friendly note.
Quality & sustainability
100% organic cotton, with each item made just for you.
Prints that last
High quality printing that lasts over time, and a customer experience we keep a close eye on.
The mission
Our goal is ending animal agriculture as we know it, and the biggest roadblock is culture: we want people to feel proud of choosing not to take part in animal exploitation, and to make that choice feel less lonely.
We also want to give back, which is why 10% of our profits flow to animal sanctuaries and animal rights organisations. It's the least we can do. You can see where it goes here.
Doing all this takes a slightly unreasonable amount of obsession, and we lean on the speed, stubbornness and attention to detail we picked up from years of competitive gaming. But underneath the emails and long hours, we're two friends trying to make a difference in this world we live in.
Thanks for being part of it.
— Alessio & Matthijs
