Everlane Sold to Shein. Here Is Why I Am Not Surprised.

Originally shared as a video essay on my YouTube channel. Watch the full conversation here.

When the news broke that Everlane had been sold to Shein, my phone filled up with messages. Friends texting, people tagging me on Instagram, my FYP pushing videos. Almost all of them said some version of the same thing: can you believe this?

I could, actually. And I want to explain why.

The Everlane Issue

Everlane built their brand on radical transparency. They were going to show you exactly where your clothes were made, exactly what the markup was, exactly who was in their supply chain. It was a genuinely compelling idea and it worked. I bought my first Everlane t-shirts around 2013 or 2014 and I was hooked. I still have both of them. The quality was real and the mission felt real.

But somewhere around 2018 I started noticing things. The material compositions started shifting, with more synthetic blends creeping in. That matters because once you blend a natural fiber with polyester, spandex, or any synthetic you lose the ability to recycle it at end of life. It is a small thing but it is a tell. Then came the union busting allegations in 2020. Customer service employees organized and Everlane responded by laying them off and rehiring. Then reporting emerged about racial bias in their casting, a preference for Eurocentric features even in models of color.

What the Shein acquisition reveals is what happens behind the scenes when private equity and venture capital catalyze a brand growth: profits not matter your values. When brand's identity is built on messaging and aesthetics rather than genuine structural commitment, the values were always going to be negotiable. Everlane became a venture-backed company with investors to answer to. That was always going to come first and their sustainability positioning just became the story they told.

Why Fashion Brands Cannot Scale and Stay Sustainable

There is a fundamental conflict between growth and sustainability that I do not think gets talked about honestly enough.

To grow a company you have to either sell more to your existing customers or find new ones. Both paths require convincing people to buy more than they currently are. At a certain scale the only way to hit revenue targets is to manufacture desire, to make people feel like they need something they did not know they “needed.” That is the opposite of intentional consumption.

Sustainable fashion works as a lifestyle business. It works as a small brand with a ceiling and a loyal community. It breaks when you try to turn it into a growth company, because the growth model requires you to do exactly what sustainability asks you not to do.

The current economic environment makes this even harder. Tariffs, rising cost of goods, a genuine affordability crisis. People are not shopping the way they were five years ago and they should not have to. The small independent brands with the tightest margins are the ones absorbing the most pressure. The brands selling things for almost nothing are not feeling it the same way.

I Know This Because I Lived It

I ran a slow fashion clothing brand from 2018 to 2023. I started it as something close to an experiment. I have spent my career in climate change policy and advocacy and I was genuinely curious whether you could run a truly sustainable, truly ethical fashion company within a capitalist system. I made everything locally in LA. I knew every person who sewed every piece. I measured my emissions every year from the beginning and offset what I could not eliminate. I used deadstock and recycled materials. I made to order and in small-batches. I tried to do everything “right.”

And my business grew. I got into Madewell, which felt like a real milestone. But what I noticed when I started selling through a larger platform was that my return rate tripled. The customer buying directly from me had spent time getting to know the clothes. They bought with intention and rarely sent things back. The customer coming through a larger marketplace was shopping differently, buying multiple sizes, returning most of it, and the cost of processing those returns ate into my margins in ways I had not anticipated.

More than that, I started to feel the pressure of what scaling actually requires. I needed to keep pushing product to my existing customers. More styles, more colors, more reasons to buy again. And I did not actually believe they needed more. I made things to last. I still have my own pieces. A lot of my original customers still have theirs. That was the point… but it was not a growth model.

I closed the business as I stepped into motherhood, before the tariffs, before a lot of the post-Covid contraction really hit. I am glad I did. Not because it was not working, but because I could see where it was going and it was not somewhere I wanted to go.

The Post-Covid Slow Fashion Graveyard

During Covid, something genuinely beautiful happened. People were home, they were thinking about their values, the Black Lives Matter movement was sparking broader conversations about ethics and who we support with our dollars. A lot of small slow fashion brands including mine grew during that period in ways that felt meaningful and community-driven.

And then, over the following years, many of those same brands closed.

This was not personal failure. It was structural. Materials costs went up. Consumer spending pulled back. People started spending on experiences again instead of things, which is honestly reasonable. Ultra-fast fashion got even faster and even cheaper. The brands that survived either scaled in ways that required compromising their original values, or stayed small enough to survive on loyalty alone. Most could not do either indefinitely.

The brands that closed were not cautionary tales. They were casualties of a system that was never designed for what they were trying to do.

What This Means for How We Shop

I want to be careful here because I am not interested in making anyone feel judged. We all live inside this system. Not everything is within our individual control and I genuinely believe most people are doing the best they can.

But I think it is worth being honest: no brand at scale can be fully sustainable in the current economy. That is not a reason to give up on trying to shop thoughtfully. It is a reason to be realistic about what brands can and cannot promise you.

The most genuinely sustainable things are also the least exciting to say. Buy less. Buy better when you do buy. Wear what you already own for longer. Support independent makers when you can, knowing that alone will not fix a systemic problem. The system itself needs to change, through regulation, through corporate accountability, through policy that actually makes it easier and more affordable to do things ethically. That is a longer conversation and one I am always happy to have.

In the meantime we make the best choices we can with what is available to us.

Final Thought

Everlane selling to Shein is not really the story. The story is that we built an economy where that was always going to be the ending. A venture-backed company with investors, operating in a growth-at-all-costs model, wearing sustainability as a brand identity rather than a true commitment. Of course it sold to the highest bidder.