Not On The High Street has said it will suspend the sale of faux fur products on its website after discovering some items may have been made from animal fur.
Kate Burns, general counsel at the retailer said it was in the process of “taking down every single faux fur product on the site” after a charity, Humane Society International (HSI), wrote to it yesterday to say it suspected several items from one seller were made from animal products.
Burns made the admission, for which she said she was “very disappointed and sorry”, to a committee of MPs who are looking into fur trade in the UK following a series of media exposes that highlighted major retailers accidentally selling animal fur.
The committee was also questioning Amazon, which along with other retailers including Missguided, Amazon and Boohoo has been found accidentally selling real fur in the past.
It is not the first time HSI has found real fur for sale on Not On The High Street. In December 2017, it found a keyring being sold on the site that was advertised as faux fur was in fact made from rabbit fur.
The charity told HuffPost UK it suspected that a further eight items, on sale yesterday but since removed, were made of animals including rabbit and mink. These were headbands and keyrings, HSI said.
In a statement to HuffPost UK, Not On The High Street said it had been made aware one of the sellers on the site, who had previously been investigated, had “continued to sell fake fur products that contain real fur.” It said it was addressing this issue “as a matter of urgency.”
“This is a breach of our Terms and Conditions and we have removed all of the partner’s products from sale while we investigate this matter [and] Notonthehighstreet is committed to being a fur-free retailer,” the spokesperson said.
“Our policies prohibit the sale of real fur and angora, and products made with synthetic materials made to look like animal products must be clearly labelled as such.
“This investigation has highlighted that some of our processes to uphold these policies are in need of further review and we would like to apologise for this. We are now temporarily removing all fake fur products from our site while we confirm the provenance of materials with our partners.”
HSI UK’s director Claire Bass welcomed Not On The High Street’s move as a “strong signal they are taking this problem very seriously.”
“Customers rightly expect to be able to buy faux fur with confidence,” she said.