VEGANSTREET.COM THROUGH THE YEARS 

The homepage from our original 1998 website (this page is from 2003)

Marla as Valerie Veggieburger, circa 1997

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VeganStreet.com 1.0 (1998) – a dream imagined

​John and I got this idea to start a website dedicated to promoting veganism in 1998 when we were traveling through Maine. At the time, I was working at a large animal shelter in various capacities (humane education, animal behavior) and I loved my job, but three years prior, John and I had gone vegan and it was clear that this was our life’s work. By 1998, John had co-founded a communications agency for environmental organizations after a career in big advertising. At the time, though, we were looking for me to transition into promoting this nascent movement full time and as well pulled out of a gas station somewhere in rural Maine, after brainstorming the whole trip around what we wanted the site to be, the name “Vegan Street” popped into my head, clear as a bell. 

Once we had the name, we immediately got a sense of what VeganStreet.com would be: Friendly, optimistic, inclusive, welcoming, unabashed. More than anything, though, the original Vegan Street was created to amplify and normalize veganism at a time when it was just emerging. This was back in the day of AOL dial-ups and John entering everything by code but we didn’t know any difference. While John kept his day job, I left the shelter and worked on promoting veganism every day. We even had our first shop, where we sent catalogs to people with our Vegan Street Gear and they would actually fill out order forms and send it to our P.O. box, that’s how old school things were. VeganStreet.com was shot through with our passionate embrace of a DIY ethic and street theater inspired activism and outreach. Our site was frequently described as the Internet's first vegan online magazine.

Our son (Justice!) was born in 2002 and we started working on other projects, including Chicago’s first vegan festival. We kept the VeganStreet.com URL going but we stopped updating it in 2003 as we focused elsewhere. It was dormant for ten years until…

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The homepage from our 2013 reboot. This page from 2020.

John as Tofu Man at Chicago's Pride Parade, circa 2014

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VeganStreet.com 2.0 (2013) a dream reignited

By 2013, the vegan world was really starting to make major strides as plant-based grocery items improved, the general public became more familiar and vegans online used social media to promote the vegan message. When we resurrected Vegan Street, veganism had been nudged from the margins it had been stagnating in for years and was much more normalized and accessible. Conversations about compassionate living that once were facilitated by pamphlets were now initiated online in a way that could reach many, many times more people.  

Before we resurrected Vegan Street, I had been on Facebook for a few years and thought that the vegan messaging I was seeing could be improved on visually, in terms of research and framing. This was totally in our wheelhouse as communicators and we saw the potential for getting the word out in a way that could influence people exponentially. I remember telling John about this thing called a “meme” and it was the first he’d heard of it. Putting it in terms that were familiar to someone from the business, I said it was like an ad, but instead of selling products, we would be putting out information, promotion and advocacy. 

We immediately saw Vegan Street’s place in helping to professionalize vegan communications and how we were uniquely suited to do this. We dusted off the old website just a little and retooled it for the new world, one that was ready for us. This time, too, we added more features that we thought would appeal to not just the vegan world, which was what we focused on originally, but people seeking help in transitioning more toward this way of living. We concentrated not only on memes, but essays, recipes, guides and how-to type articles, setting a schedule of 4 - 5 new pieces of content each week. As we are our own little sphere, we answer to no one and can turn around new materials as quickly as we are able, something that was mind-blowing to John, coming from the ad world where things move much more glacially and are analyzed to an inch of their lives behind the scenes before publication. In 2017 (is this correct?), we joined Patreon as a way for people who appreciate the free materials we are creating to support our work. (We are still there and you can still join for as little as $1.00 a week!) We also brought back our Vegan Street designs but outsourced them to me printed and shipped by a third party. We still are selling our gear, now in far more forms that we could have maintained an inventory for in our home.

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The homepage from our new 2020 site.

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John after recovering from leukemia, 2020

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VeganStreet.com 3.0 (2020) a dream modernized

Thank you for being patient with us as we are slowly are migrating more than 2,000 pages of content that we’ve created over all these years of promoting veganism from our little home on the internet. With VeganStreet.com 3.0, we are organized, streamlined and way more modern, but the heart that beats within is the same one that started that little dream of a website way back in 1998: passionate, enthusiastic and more dedicated to spreading the vegan message - and offering tools for access - every day.  While we had brought back Vegan Street for the age of social media, VeganStreet.com was still very much a static site of the last century. We have slowly but surely been overhauling the site to make it much cleaner, more streamlined and, most important, revamped so that the memes, recipes, essays, interviews, guides and more that we create can be easily shared via cell phones. Second, we are in the process of adding search terms for these thousands of pieces of content so it is easy to retrieve from the site through a simple search. We are thrilled that VeganStreet.com, in its new iteration, is really able to work for us better in spreading the vegan message. ​

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