“This is like if SeaWorld bought PETA.”
That was fashion designer Camille Witt (@kindof_camille), reacting on Instagram to a Puck News report that ethical DTC brand Everlane is being sold—some say “sold out”—to ultra-fast-fashion giant Shein for $100 million.
Laura Norkin, a former longtime InStyle editor, was more succinct.
“Haha gross,” she wrote as @inlauraswords.
The bombshell from Puck’s fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman landed as the industry was still reeling from another unexpected Bay Area shock: Allbirds’ pivot away from footwear. Last month, the company said it would switch to providing computing power to AI developers after offloading its footwear business for $39 million, less than 1 percent of its previous $4 billion valuation.
Everlane’s financial cachet has dropped, too. At its peak, when the company raised an $85 million funding round led by L Catterton in 2020, it was valued at $550 million. The LVMH-backed private equity firm would take over as majority owner in 2024, just as the brand started seeing growing debt and slowing growth.
As with Allbirds, the reveal sparked disbelief. Everlane built its identity around the concept of “radical transparency,” a phrase it trademarked to signal its openness about how it made and priced its clothing. Selling to Shein, a company long criticized for opacity, underscores the contradiction at the heart of the deal. It also raises a broader question: What happens to those values when they collide with the pressures of scale, competition and shareholder expectations?
“Consumers did everything right,” said Katya Moorman, editor in chief of No Kill Magazine and an adjunct professor of fashion communication at the Pratt Institute. “They researched, they paid more, they extended trust. What these two stories show is that the trust was being held by companies that weren’t willing to do the hard work when it stopped being profitable.”
Everlane declined to comment on the report or whether layoffs were taking place as a result. Any cuts were not large enough to trigger a WARN notice, but Katina Boutis, until recently Everlane’s head of sustainability, who is currently on maternity leave, confirmed to Sourcing Journal that she was no longer working for the brand. Boutis was also “just as surprised” to read Puck’s report, though she was unable to elaborate due to the terms of her separation agreement.
Under Boutis’s leadership, Everlane said it achieved a 52 percent reduction in absolute carbon emissions, driven by the near-elimination of virgin plastics and a shift to 95 percent organic, regenerative or traceable cotton.
Shein did not respond to an email seeking more information.
Unlike many observers, Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at analytics firm GlobalData, saw this coming.
“The business hasn’t been performing well and has a lot of debt that is not sustainable,” he said. “It needed new ownership to survive over the medium term. Shein provides that financial stability.”
Puck News reported in March that L Catterton had been seeking an investor to tackle a roughly $90 million deficit. There were also claims of overdue rent totaling $171,000 at the brand’s San Francisco offices.
The deal may work for Shein, too, Saunders said. While it may take significant brand repositioning, Shein may want to turn its new acquisition into its own version of Quince, an online-only retailer that touts “affordable luxury” apparel, home goods and accessories, much like Everlane’s own “elevated basics.”
“From Shein’s point of view, Everlane allows them to play in a segment beyond fast fashion,” he said. “That’s important now that growth is harder in the low-price space, especially as there are a lot of obstacles to trading in the U.S. from tariffs. Everlane is not revolutionary for Shein, but it does support a narrative of having a more balanced portfolio that can be sold to potential investors during any future IPO.”
Indeed, the revelation isn’t so much that Shein is snapping up another asset, but that it’s acquiring a company long known for promoting sustainability, social responsibility and transparency, said Sheng Lu, professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.
Everlane, for example, has historically disclosed all of its contracted factories to the public, listing their names, locations, products and even specific sustainability efforts. Shein, on the other hand, has not.
“As of 2024, nearly every Tier 1 factory producing apparel for Everlane holds multiple sustainability-related certifications, including those for various recycled and organic materials and for the Better Cotton Initiative, as well as social compliance audits,” Lu said. “Several factories even reported their progress toward achieving a living wage. That level of transparency stands in sharp contrast to many of the criticisms Shein has faced regarding labor practices and supply-chain transparency.”
Lu agreed with Saunders that acquiring Everlane would be strategic for Shein because it would help the company expand into a more premium market beyond ultra-fast fashion, which mainly targets Gen Z. The acquisition could also lend Shein greater legitimacy, particularly as it wrestles with ongoing regulatory and reputational fallout in North America and Europe.
At the same time, Shein’s acquisition of a U.S. brand like Everlane could invite a different kind of attention. Chinese ownership of a recognizable American consumer brand “remains a sensitive issue in the current geopolitical climate,” Lu said—highlighting that scrutiny cuts both ways.
But the friction surrounding global fashion extends beyond a geopolitical tug-of-war over corporate ownership. For Hakan Karaosman, an associate professor at Politecnico di Milano in Italy, the real crisis is a moral one.
“The fashion industry has never been in a worse state,” he said. “Capitalism has taken over everything, and we are neglecting the people who are vital for the economy: garment workers.”
Everlane has fielded its own share of controversy before, notably in 2020 when it navigated a series of high-profile public reckonings, including union-busting allegations and a damning internal report on corporate racial bias. Critics have also frequently dismissed the brand’s sustainability claims as “greenwashing,” pointing to a stark disconnect between Everlane’s aggressive marketing and often-vague details regarding factory conditions, wages and carbon emissions.
“Part of the problem is that a lot of brands, marketing departments and PR agencies still don’t know how to talk about sustainability,” said Katrina Caspelich, founder of Best Coast Public Relations and former interim executive director of fashion advocacy group Remake. “They either overclaim and end up in greenwashing territory, or they underclaim and bury the real work in a footer no one clicks. Neither builds trust. Both leave consumers confused, and confused consumers default to the cheapest option.”
Caspelich admitted her first reaction was an emotional one.
“News like this can make it feel like the whole movement is sliding backwards, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Remake closing in February gutted me. This sale stings on top of it. The easy move right now would be to throw in the towel,” she said. “I’m personally choosing the opposite because the demand for better is still there, and the brands doing the real work still deserve a megaphone.”
In the end, it seemed that Everlane could not reconcile its progressive slow-fashion ethos with the growth-at-all-costs demands of venture capital backing.
“Everlane could have become Gap, back in a time when that company had really lost its way,” Maxine Bédat, executive director of the “think and do” tank New Standard Institute, wrote on LinkedIn. “But I imagine the VC funds it received did not want to leave it time for that and also because VC people tend not to understand how central design and culture [are] to a brand. If it can’t be translated immediately into a KPI, it’s not worth it, from a VC perspective.”
That’s the problem with the “sustainable brand” myth: You can’t shop your way out of the climate crisis.
“If anything, I hope this story helps illuminate to all those [who] once believed that sustainability was going to come through us buying from ‘sustainable brands’ that that is a fool’s errand,” Bédat added.
Will shoppers bite? Even being part of the Shein group might be off-putting and “somewhat jarring” for core Everlane customers, Saunders said.
“Shein has the finances and patience to undertake this, but it would also need to be prepared to endure some short-term pain due to customer churn,” he said. “Ultimately, the deal likely saves Everlane. But that salvation comes at a price.”
Moorman said that both the Everlane and Allbirds swivels reveal that there were people in the sustainability space who were “just capitalizing on consumer awareness.”
“Clothing production—outside of small, independent bespoke brands—demands scale, and scale demands more production,” she said. “Sustainability is structurally at odds with the growth model, and I don’t think either of these brands was ever honest about that, with their customers or themselves.”
Or as science and fashion journalist Whitney Bauck, a.k.a. @unwrinkling, wrote on Puck News’s Instagram post: 🫠.
