Everlane founder Michael Preysman is launching a new brand after Shein’s surprise $100 million acquisition of his original company. Here’s what it means for sustainable fashion.
The pitch for Everlane was essentially this: the fashion industry is broken, here’s exactly how, and you’ll feel better about paying more once you understand why. The brand launched in 2011 with a supply chain so publicly documented it practically dared you not to buy from it — fabric costs, labor costs, factory names, the whole ledger. It promised to eradicate virgin plastic from its supply chain, gave customers virtual tours of the factories it used, and built an audience that believed, sincerely, that spending $68 on a T-shirt from the right company was a meaningful act. By 2016, Everlane was valued at $250 million. The company had achieved all of this without traditional retail middlemen, building an identity around the idea that factory names and honest cost breakdowns could become the whole point of buying clothes. Then, on May 17, it was sold to Shein for $100 million, a transaction that Everlane’s own founder did not know about until it appeared in the news.
Michael Preysman, who launched the brand in 2011, said as much in a LinkedIn post following the announcement. “Everlane was Radical. We stood up as something different. A brand with guts, run by people with guts,” he wrote. “So much of what we did resonated. And while it didn’t always work along the way, millions of customers chose us and millions more watched. We set a new standard for consumers and the industry that many followed. No one can ever take that away.”
Still Radical
Preysman announced Still Radical, a new venture that directly references Everlane’s trademarked tagline — radical transparency. The company built its entire identity around that phrase, which makes the provenance of Preysman’s new project fairly plain. The statement on the site leaves little room for interpretation. “I started Everlane in 2011. Last week, the current management team sold it to Shein. So we’re starting over. Same principles, but a new take. And this time: no venture capital, no private equity.”
L Catterton — the venture capital arm of luxury conglomerate LVMH — acquired a majority stake in Everlane in 2020, around the same time Preysman departed. He went on to launch Magna, a supplements brand, in 2024. The company he had built went through two rounds of layoffs — one during the pandemic, another in 2023 — before landing in the hands of Shein. Everlane’s current CEO Alfred Chang moved quickly to frame the deal as progress, saying the company would remain committed to sustainability and “exceptional quality,” and that the partnership “creates incredible new possibilities to accelerate that vision.”
Ken Pucker, former COO of Timberland and a sustainability professor at Tufts University, told CBC News the deal was “distressing because of the appearance that one of the world’s least sustainable companies [is] buying a company that tried to demonstrate a different path.” Maxine Bédat, founder of sustainable fashion think tank New Standard Institute, told PBS NewsHour: “Shein is a company that is known for its speed. It’s known for air freighting product, which is very high in emissions. So it’s not clear to me how this sustainable company is going to do emerging with what is seen as the biggest and baddest.”
Katya Moorman, editor in chief of No Kill Magazine and an adjunct professor of fashion communication at Pratt Institute, told WWD the acquisition had exposed something particularly corrosive about the companies that had accepted consumers’ trust. “Consumers did everything right. They researched, they paid more, they extended trust,” she said. “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.” Moorman added: “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.”
Starting over without the money men
Preysman helped establish the direct-to-consumer template that produced Away, Warby Parker, Allbirds, and Glossier — companies that collectively raised billions in venture capital on similar premises — an entire generation of brands built on the premise that principled values and venture-backed growth could coexist — and every one of those companies raised significant capital to scale. Everlane had raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital before L Catterton acquired a majority stake in 2020. What venture capital demands in return is growth, and growth in apparel means more inventory, faster production cycles, expanded marketing spend, which creates precisely the kind of pressure that tends to push sustainable intentions toward unsustainable outcomes.
In fifteen years, Everlane went from insisting consumers deserved to know the name of their factory to being owned by a company that has largely resisted exactly that kind of disclosure, and the distance between those two positions is not incidental. It is, in fact, the predictable end point of accepting venture capital in the first place — a structure that required growth above all else, including above the ethics it was supposed to protect. Whether a fashion brand can actually hold to its ethics without that fuel injection is, at this point, a genuinely open question. Preysman hasn’t announced a launch date or made clear what Still Radical will sell. Given what just happened to the company he spent a decade building, the experiment seems worth running again.
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