Blog

This year, over 1200 women were nominated or registered for The 2018 Mompreneur Awards, and 205 entrants advanced. After accumulating points based on a public voting stage from over 90,000 public voters and 30,000 supporters and impression ratings from a selection committee, 23 Top Finalists were chosen from all across Canada to fly to Toronto for the National Mompreneurs® Conference... 

Monique Helbig (Founder & CEO of Wallis Evera, 2018 Clean50 Award Winner)

Canada’s Clean50 Awards are announced annually by Delta Management Group and the Clean50 organization to recognize those 50 individuals or small teams, from 16 different categories, who have done the most to advance the cause of sustainability and clean capitalism in Canada over the past 2 years... 

Larissa Petrillo (Faculty, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Department of Anthropology)

I am an instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) Anthropology Department, the Coordinator and Founder of KPU's Certificate in Non-Governmental Organizations and Nonprofit Studies, and Experiential Learning Teaching Fellow...

Tara Teng (Blogger, Public Speaker, BC Director for the Joy Smith Foundation)

I am a Life & Style Blogger for Ethical Style and Socially Conscious Living. I'm also a Public Speaker and the BC Director of the Joy Smith Foundation; we work to end human trafficking in Canada...

Yvonne Yua (Senior Director, WealthWave)

I am a Financial Professional and Senior Director with WealthWave, also known as “The How Money Works Company.” I am dedicated to helping others find financial freedom through literacy and application...

Wendy Armbruster Bell (Founder & CEO Snugabell)

I design and manufacture breastfeeding and pumping products for moms that are not willing to forgo fashion for function.  I don’t feel that I chose this path, but rather that it chose me.  I am an apparel designer by trade and then I had a baby and my two worlds collided...

Mira Goto (Singer/Songwriter)

I am a songwriter, so I get to create for a living.  I write in the hopes that an artist will license (or "pick up") one of my songs and release it.  On any given day, I will have what's called a 'cowrite' with one or two other people; we spend a few hours writing, rewriting, and polishing a song until we leave with a completed piece.  I have always loved the songwriting process, and though I still love performing, walking into a room with nothing and leaving with something is the most rewarding part.  I get to tell stories in music for a living; I have the best job in the world...

This night was yet another dream come true! The runway ran through Hycroft, a magnificent Edwardian mansion located in Shaughnessy, and out to overlook the skyline of Vancouver. The models were an ahh-MAZING(!!) group of women with phenomenal energy and personality, the music was pumping, the wine was flowing, there was joy and warmth in the air...

We had the honour of dressing an amazing group of business women for a fashion show at the Vancouver Mompreneurs Achieve & Lead Conference a few weeks ago. It was a full day event of inspiration, leadership, new connections and support. This is the local chapter of a national organization that I absolutely love and am so proud to be a part of. 

Being an entrepreneur is tough enough. Being a Mompreneur adds a level of messiness and complexity to the whole adventure that sometimes just doesn't make a lot of sense...

I was recently featured in Vancouver Mom, which for years has been one of my go-to online places to connect with the local mommy community and find out what’s new and exciting to bring my kids to. Becoming a mom was really the spark that ignited the fire for me in terms of wanting to actively create the kind of world I wanted to live in.

Prior to motherhood, I was definitely a fast fashion shopaholic. I only really became aware of Organic Cotton when I started shopping for bedding and clothing for my new baby girl. I only started paying attention to fabric content, chemical additives and where things were made when it came to choosing what would be touching my daughter’s beautiful, newborn skin. Of course, I wanted only the very best for her! It took a few years, but gradually I started looking at my own closet and began examining what I was choosing to put on my skin, too...

Just for the record: hemp is a new thing to me, too. Until just a couple years ago, when I started this business, I didn't own any hemp clothing, I didn't know anyone else that owned hemp clothing, and I didn't know of anywhere one would even go to buy hemp clothing if they wanted to.

The concept of it only came onto my radar by chance, when I happened upon a book in the local public library, called "Overdressed: the shockingly high cost of cheap fashion," by Elizabeth L. Cline.  After that book, I was hooked -- I devoured every book and article I could get my hands on that related to Slow Clothes and the Eco-Fashion movement...

Etsy Made In Canada is coming up next weekend!

Join us to celebrate and shop Canadian talent in pop-up markets across the country. Each show is carefully curated and juried to ensure the best mix of arts and crafts, as well as quality and originality. We are proud to be joining an incredible roster of local makers at the Etsy Vancouver Market on Sept 24-25 from 10am-5pm...

Sustainable fashion means that pretty is just a starting point. Beyond that... how deep are you willing to look, what are you finding out, and how does that make you feel? Thoughtful design, ethically made and consciously chosen -- these are things that really matter. At Wallis Evera, our cuts are classic and our stance is unapologetically political. 

I write this because I've been thinking a lot about an online article I came across about a week ago, called "Moral fiber: A wrinkle in the ethical market."  It talks about a recent study conducted by researchers from Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin, which shows that people really don't care about ethical luxury practices as much as they claim to...

Your polyester, nylon and acrylic clothes are made from plastic derived from crude oil. Sure, they may be cheap, colorful and able to wick sweat like nobody's business, but those synthetic duds are also non-biodegradable, suck a lot of energy and release large amounts of greenhouse gases in their manufacturing process, and then shed an onslaught of nasty micro-fibres into all of our oceans and waterways every time they're laundered. Cotton doesn't tell any prettier a story. It's an extremely thirsty, land-intensive, chemically dependent crop that is directly responsible for the degradation of several large-scale ecosystems around the world. It's time to bring in some alternative fibres to mainstream clothing and get rid of our addiction to synthetics and conventional cotton...

Summer is my favourite time of year, but it's also the one that brings the greatest strain on that delicate work-life balance. With school out, two months of vacation time with the entire family at home has been fantastic. However, balancing all that fun with the work that still needs to be done everyday to build a startup business is... tough...

Fabric innovation has been in the news a lot lately. It's an exciting time to be part of the fashion industry, as new technologies are driving advances in materials sciences and opening up a whole new field of possibilities for the clothes we wear. Fashion is frivolous? No. It has the power to transform the world and all of our lives with it.

This article by Kate Abnett in The Business of Fashion has completely captivated us.  It's an incredibly intelligent and well-written piece about the intersection of science and fashion today. She writes that we are in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution -- powered by a constellation of new innovations across the physical, digital and biological worlds, from 3D printing and artificial intelligence to advances in biomaterials -- which is driving a new wave of change across the economy, with major implications for fashion...

We shipped our Lila II Dress off to Paris in the spring. We couldn’t be more pleased with the beautiful photos and review we received from Leotie Lovely which ended up comprising part of her #GoneGreen2016 series of daily doings and suggestions for sustainable living. She writes:

“Most female business attire is made with fabrics which are petroleum derivatives, like polyester, acrylic, or nylon, all of which will never biodegrade and cause huge damages to the earth in their creation. These collections, whether luxury lines or fast fashion finds are more often than not created by the hands of exploited workers, including children... If you’re a conscious compassionate human, these are fabrics and practices which you’ll be wanting to avoid.”

We wanted to share some of gorgeous ways that our dresses are being styled across the country and introduce you to some of the amazing bloggers that are helping to promote sustainable, eco-friendly fashion.  Karen Housel is an environmental scientist and founder of Sustainable Daisy. Based in LA, she writes about beauty products and green DIY lifestyle tips as well as fashion. Bright, fun and friendly, her blog and Instagram feeds are definitely worth following...