Everlane shoppers come unraveled over sale to Shein

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — Everlane, a company that promised shoppers affordable and ethically defensible clothing, may be over as customers have known it.

Shoppers are rattled by reports that Everlane, the former direct-sales retailer that promised sustainably made clothes, is being purchased by fast-fashion giant Shein. The $100 million deal was made to absolve Everlane’s $90 million in debt, Puck’s Lauren Sherman reported. (Representatives for Everlane, its majority owner L Catterton and Shein have not confirmed the sale.)

“Cool cool need to go buy 46 white t-shirts before the formula changes,” writer Sophie Vershbow posted on X. (In a screenshot, it appeared she only bought three.)

For customers partial to its boxy T-shirts and sturdy jeans, Everlane’s affordable prices and commitment to “radical transparency” eased their guilt about buying new stuff. Since its launch in 2010, Everlane broke down pricing and production costs and traced its garments’ manufacturing and material origins, which customers could easily find on its site. Shein, a company routinely accused of shoddy quality and unsafe working conditions for its employees, feels incompatible with a brand built on sustainability. (The sustainable fashion watchdog group Good on You rated Everlane as “good” in terms of its sustainability, a holistic score that takes into account labor practices, waste output and materials, calculated from company-reported and third-party data and accreditations. The same site rated Shein as a brand to avoid.)

“This was a brand founded on ethical consumption, which is the complete opposite of what Shein stands for,” said Shawn Grain Carter, an associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who teaches courses on sustainable style. “Fast fashion is the antithesis of sustainability. It’s cheap labor, it’s produced at any cost and rarely is it done in an ethical supply chain. So to have an acquisition by a company that goes directly against the core values of your core customer is problematic in many ways.”

Plenty of brands make durable basics, some of them under “sustainable” banners. But after more than a decade of building a customer base who just wanted to buy a bunch of elevated, office-friendly clothes in neutral hues without guilt, Everlane reportedly agreeing to the sale feels like a “betrayal” of its values and its regular shoppers, Grain Carter said.

“It almost feels personal, that this is how it ends,” said Madeleine Alizadeh, a fashion writer who started her own small brand, DariaDeh, with similar sustainable aims.

Kirstie Wang, a small business owner from the Bay Area who’s accused Shein of stealing her designs, said in an Instagram reel that news of the rumored sale made her cry.

“I think I just really looked up to them, and half my closet is Everlane,” she said in the video. “How did they swing the pendulum so far that they’re able to sell to the radical opposite of what they stood for?”

The promise of Everlane’s ‘radical transparency’

Everlane was “genuinely pioneering” when it launched, Alizadeh said. At the time, she said, “ethical fashion” felt like it was dominated by luxury labels like Stella McCartney and “granola” brands like Patagonia. Customers didn’t need to spend a few thousand dollars or plan a hiking trip to wear Everlane.

Everlane aimed to make affordable, well-made essentials that would survive volatile trend and washer cycles. Like onetime direct-sales upstarts Allbirds and Glossier, the San Francisco-born brand initially sold everything online to keep its operations lean. But its main selling point was the message that shoppers could know where and how the products were produced, to make informed decisions about their consumption.

The clothes were unshowy but versatile, appropriate for the office but casual enough for weekend wear. Everlane started with T-shirts –– the brand said it only had 1,500 units at first, with a waitlist of more than 60,000 potential customers, the Strategist reported –– and eventually expanded into cashmere sweaters, non-stretch jeans, leather flats and backpacks, all of which have been highly rated by the shopping verticals of Vogue, New York and the New York Times.

Everlane has been criticized before for reneging on its commitment to transparency when convenient. In 2020, a group of customer service employees accused Everlane of laying them off after they unionized. The same year, former employees published detailed accounts of anti-Black racism at the company and the New York Times picked up their stories. (Founder and then-CEO Michael Preysman apologized to employees who “experienced harm” at Everlane and said the company would add Black people to its senior leadership team and board, among other measures.)

And for years, critics have accused Everlane of “greenwashing,” or exaggerating its environmental friendliness to attract customers: in 2021, Everlane missed its own goal of eliminating all use of virgin plastics. (“Inevitably, you’re not going to always land and get things right, and that’s scary for people,” Preysman said in a 2021 sponsored conversation with Inc.)

Shein, meanwhile, is notorious for its cheap, trendy clothes made from synthetic materials. In 2021, it dropped as many as 500 new products a day; more recent reports put that figure upwards of 5,000 as its international popularity surged. Independent brands have accused Shein of stealing their designs. For years it’s been accused of unsafe conditions for its workers, some of whom reportedly have worked 75 hours a week with only one day off a month. The company admitted in 2024 that it had found two cases of child labor in its factories and said it had taken “remediation steps” to end the children’s employment and return them to their families.

Everlane’s debt will be absolved if its rumored sale to Shein goes through, but Shein has more to gain reputationally from the acquisition, Grain Carter said: “They’re going to use this as an opportunity to pretend to rebrand themselves.”

“If a brand built on radical transparency ends up under Shein, of all companies, it reinforces a deeply damaging message: that even the ‘better’ option eventually folds into the same system,” said Brittany Sierra, writer and founder and CEO of the annual industry conference Sustainable Fashion Forum. “And that couldn’t come at a worse time, because sustainable fashion already has a trust problem.”

Since 2020, when Everlane raised $85 million from investors at a $550 million public valuation, the brand’s ethics have been “competing with their exit strategy,” Alizadeh said. The company was expected to grow that investment quickly, at the cost of the production methods that made it popular, she said. Stella McCartney, which has been vegan from its 2001 founding and also committed to going plastic-free in 2018, has partnered with fast-fashion retailer H&M and Adidas, both of which are rated fairly low by Good on You. Earlier this year, Allbirds announced it would rebrand from a shoe company that made footwear from recycled materials to an AI business.

“The lesson here isn’t that ethical fashion doesn’t work, it’s that you sometimes have to consciously choose not to grow in order to maintain your standards,” Alizadeh said.

What is ‘sustainable’? Don’t think too much about it

For a certain customer, Sierra said, Everlane offered a “psychological shortcut” to keep buying new clothes without regret –– and without having to understand what makes their clothes “sustainable,” she said.

“For many consumers, the goal isn’t necessarily to consume less,” Sierra said. “It’s to consume differently while preserving the emotional rewards of shopping.”

It’s human, not evil, to derive joy from buying a new pair of shoes, she said. But for many, sustainable fashion has become a “permission structure for maintaining the exact same consumption habits, just with less guilt attached.”

Many customers fear that Everlane’s sale to Shein means the end of the brand’s “radical transparency” and a decline in the quality of its clothes. If Everlane no longer resembles its former self, it’s not guaranteed that those customers will immediately seek sustainable replacements, Sierra said.

“We like to assume that if consumers care, they’ll seek out better alternatives,” she said. “In reality, most people optimize for ease. So I don’t think the average shopper suddenly becomes a sustainability detective because Everlane disappears.”

It’s possible that, if Everlane stops marketing itself as sustainable under Shein, competing brands will follow suit, comedian Temi Adeoye said in a TikTok, calling the rumored sale the “death knell for a specific type of compassionate capitalism.”

“I knew Everlane probably wasn’t all that ethical or all that different, but at least companies used to fake it,” she said. “And now they’re not even gonna pretend.”

Grain Carter said Everlane customers will probably buy more regularly from the popular Japanese brand Uniqlo or the mall stalwart Gap, where there’s almost always a sale happening; similar styles at a higher price can be found at the less reliably sustainable J.Crew, she said. Save for Uniqlo, most of the brands that make clothes comparable in style and price to Everlane are less “radically transparent” when it comes to their own supply chains.

In its rumored sale to Shein, Everlane will lose many customers’ trust forever, Grain Carter said — sustainability and ethical consumption are values young shoppers still consider when they’re buying. Regaining their loyalty would first require the company to operate completely autonomous from Shein, she said, which is unlikely.

“Most of the time, a customer might forgive one misstep, maybe two,” Grain Carter said. “But this is more than a misstep. This is a total assault on the integrity of what this brand stood for.”

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