It was a face-to-face encounter with a cow during a family trip to an Israeli kibbutz that prompted Queens native and MooShoes co-owner Erica Kubersky to become a vegetarian. "I just made a connection with the cow and asked my parents about it," says Kubersky, who was 8 years old at the time. "I was lucky that they didn't lie to me and were very supportive of my decision."

Eight years after Erica first embraced vegetarianism, her older sister, Sara, convinced her to give up dairy and leather products and become a full-fledged vegan. In 2001, after having graduated from college with degrees in English (Erica) and nutrition (Sara), the Kubersky sisters decided to make the vegan lifestyle more accessible to New Yorkers by opening MooShoes, the city's first vegan, cruelty-free shoe store.

"Both my sister and I find leather to be an unnecessary evil and we just wanted people who follow the vegan lifestyle to have a place to shop," Erica Kubersky says. "Owning this type of store has really been my one-and-only plan since I've been 15."

The Salad Days

First-time entrepreneurs, the Kubersky sisters scoped out the city and, ironically, opened their store in a space that had previously operated as butcher shop in Manhattan's Gramercy Park area. "It just seemed like a sign," Kubersky says, laughing. The name MooShoes sprouted randomly one day during a casual conversation among friends. Kubersky now says the name couldn't be more fitting since her store is theoretically helping cows live and, well, "moo."

Breaking into the shoe retail business was a foreign but appealing endeavor for the Kuberskys, and Erica admits she and her sister just dove in despite having neither business nor retail experience. They initially stocked the store with 20 to 30 different styles of footwear and advertised their new shop to the vegan community by running ads in local papers. Kubersky says filling the store with a decent variety of brands and styles was more of a challenge then since vegan shoe companies were few and far between. "We were lucky that we jumped into the business rather than doing as much research as we should have," Kubersky explains, suggesting that she and her sister may have been deterred had they known how hard it can be to open and operate a retail business. "We had come across some vegan shoe stores in England and decided that if they could do it, we could, too."

Some of the sisters' initial brands were Vegetarian Shoes, Ecolution, Veganwares, and Ethicalwares. The brands primarily feature "vegan leather," which aesthetically resembles leather but is made from a microfiber material that, like leather, is water-resistant, breathable, and resistant to wear and tear. "The technology has really improved throughout the years," Kubersky says. "When I was first a vegan, the prettiest option in footwear were just not available, but in the last 15 years, things have really come a long way," she adds. "All of the companies that we stock get their synthetics from high-quality sources in Italy."

MooShoes has also expanded its inventory mix, with an emphasis on including brands that feature eco-friendly materials such as hemp and canvas. The newer brands include Dansko, Birkenstock, J-41, Montrail, Splaff, Ben Sherman, Garmont, Macbeth, and Saucony, among others. The current top-selling brands are Novacas, Vegetarian Shoes, Earth and simple. Styles in men's and women's include boots, pumps, sneakers, Mary Janes, flats, sandals and oxfords. In addition, MooShoes offers a selection of vegan leather bags, wallets, belts, jackets, organic cotton apparel and cosmetics. Products like lip balm are made from organic oils and T-shirts and sweatshirts read "Go Vegan Or Die" and "Herbivore"...