For years, Everlane built its reputation around sustainability, transparency, and ethical sourcing, positioning itself as an alternative to fast fashion. So, when news broke that Shein—the ultra-fast-fashion giant known for low prices and mass production—had acquired the brand for $100 million, the reaction across retail and social media was immediate.
The deal raises bigger questions about the future of retail, sustainability messaging, consumer trust, and whether mission-driven brands can maintain credibility under the ownership of companies built on a very different business model.
I spoke with Disney Petit, the founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, a platform connecting retailers with nonprofits to redirect unsold inventory and returns to communities that need them, about what this acquisition signals for retailers, how younger consumers are balancing affordability against values, and why the real sustainability conversation goes far beyond marketing claims.
Rieva Lesonsky: For years, Everlane built its brand around sustainability and supply chain transparency, while Shein became known for ultra-fast, low-cost fashion. What was your first reaction to this acquisition?
Disney Petit: Honestly, it felt like the end of an era. Everlane was the brand that told a generation of millennials that a t-shirt didn’t have to be a mystery—here’s what it cost to make, here’s the factory that made it. That was a big deal at the time. Fast forward to now, and the brand that promised retail could be different just got bought by one of the brands it was built to be different from.
I’ll give Shein some credit; they’ve started publishing sustainability reports and saying the right things. The door is open for them to do real work here. But saying it and doing it are different things, and I haven’t seen the proof yet.
Lesonsky: Can a sustainability-focused brand maintain credibility after being acquired by a company associated with fast fashion and overconsumption?
Petit: Credibility doesn’t transfer when a deal closes. Customers don’t think about deals. They think in brands. Brands spend years, sometimes decades, building up credibility, so it has to be re-earned through every single transaction. In this particular case, the brand promise lives in the supply chain, not the logo.
Three things will tell us whether the credibility survives:
- What happens to Everlane’s supplier list? The whole “radical transparency” promise was about specific, named factories. If those quietly get swapped out for Shein’s existing suppliers in the first year, the credibility is gone.
- What happens to the cost breakdown? Does Everlane still show you what a shirt costs to make, or does that page disappear?
- What happens to unsold inventory and returns? This is the part nobody talks about, but it’s where sustainability claims either hold up or fall apart. You can source ethically on the front end and still send pallets to landfill on the back end.
Lesonsky: What does this deal say about the current pressures facing retail and fashion brands right now?
Petit: While I’m not fully informed of the financial details of this deal, I can tell you what I see generally from where I sit, working with retailers every day.
The pressures are stacking up on everyone, not just the big names. Customer acquisition costs are up. Tariffs are changing the math on sourcing. Environmental regulation is tightening in the EU and starting to move in the US. Consumer fraud and policy abuse is also on the rise.
And the buyers, meaning real shoppers, are feeling it too. Everyone is being squeezed financially right now. I genuinely can’t blame a consumer for buying what they can afford to feel good in. If the economy were in a better place, it would be more realistic to expect people to pay more for sustainable products. Right now, a lot of them just can’t, even if they want to.
Lesonsky: How much of this reflects changing consumer behavior — especially as shoppers balance affordability against sustainability concerns?
Petit: The same Gen Z customer who’ll spend more on a sustainable product will also place a $40 Shein haul that same week. That’s not hypocrisy, that’s a real person making real trade-offs in different moments.
The data backs this up. Surveys show most Gen Z shoppers say they’ll pay more for proven environmental benefits. Other data shows a huge share of them buy from fast fashion every week. Both things are true, and they’re true about the same people.
Here’s the part most consumers never see: the sustainability problem isn’t really about whether one t-shirt is organic cotton. It’s about volume, whether someone is buying 5 t-shirts or 25, and what happens to the ones that get returned or sit unsold. That’s where the industry’s emissions math actually gets decided, and none of it shows up at checkout, but you can certainly find it in landfills.
Lesonsky: Younger consumers are often described as values-driven shoppers, but they’re also highly price-sensitive. How do you see that tension playing out in today’s retail environment?
Petit: Everlane charged more because people trusted the story. Take the story away, and you’re selling a $40 t-shirt against a $4 one. That’s a fight that’s hard to win on the product alone.
For retailers, the tension shows up like this: Shoppers will say sustainability matters, and they mean it — when they’re choosing between two similar items priced within 10% of each other. But as I mentioned earlier, this is a “both-and” situation: younger generations both spend more to support sustainability but also want to indulge in fast/affordable fashion.
Lesonsky: Do you think consumers are becoming more skeptical of sustainability messaging overall?
Petit: Yes, and the people who are most skeptical are the ones who used to be the believers. Gen Z grew up assuming brands lie. Millennials grew up thinking they told the truth and would be outed if they didn’t. The bar for proof now is much higher than it was when Everlane launched.
And here’s the thing about Everlane: they didn’t lose credibility because they failed at sustainability. They lost it because of the gap between what they said and what they did. The 2020 layoffs of the workers who had just tried to unionize. Reporting from former employees about “convenient transparency.” That’s not a sustainability failure, exactly. It’s a trust failure. And once trust cracks, every sustainability claim gets read in that light.
Lesonsky: How important are logistics, returns, and unsold inventory in the broader sustainability conversation around fashion retail?
Petit: It’s the conversation nobody wants to have, and it’s where the real emissions math lives: returns.
Returns alone are an $890 billion problem in U.S. retail, about 17% of annual sales. A lot of returned products, up to 80%, never make it back to a shelf. It gets liquidated, downcycled, or sent to landfill. Unsold inventory tells the same story. Brands talk about sourcing ethically on the front end, then quietly destroy or dump goods on the back end because it costs more to store them than they’d recover from selling them.
This is exactly the work we’re doing at LiquiDonate—connecting retailers with our network of 4,600+ nonprofit partners across the U.S. and Canada so unsold goods go to people and communities that need them rather than landfill. Nearly 200 retailers are on the platform now. The pattern is consistent: the brands that take their downstream seriously are the ones whose sustainability story actually survives scrutiny. Everyone else is one investigative reporter away from a bad week.
For sustainability to be real, it has to include the end of the product’s life, not just the beginning. Sourcing without considering disposition is half the story.
Lesonsky: What operational or economic challenges make it difficult for sustainable fashion brands to scale independently today?
Petit: A few pressures I see hitting retailers right now:
- It costs more to get a customer than it used to. The whole DTC playbook assumed digital ads would stay cheap. They didn’t, and getting through the noise is nearly impossible.
- Tariffs and trade shifts have changed sourcing math. Anyone manufacturing in China is rethinking things.
- Environmental regulation is getting real. EU rules are expanding, France’s anti-fast-fashion bill is moving forward, and the bar is shifting from “report on it” to “prove it with a third party.” That costs money.
- Circularity isn’t optional anymore — but nobody has fully cracked it. Even Shein’s own reporting shows their emissions went up significantly last year despite all the ESG investment. The brands that figure out how to grow without growing their waste will win the next decade. The ones that don’t won’t make it.
The piece nobody talks about: the unit economics of most “sustainable” DTC brands never accounted for what happens to unsold goods. Sitting inventory eats cash. The brands that didn’t build a real plan for it are the ones running out of runway now.
Lesonsky: Do acquisitions like this represent the future of retail consolidation — where larger platforms absorb niche or mission-driven brands?
Petit: For the next couple of years, I think yes. The retail M&A I’m reading about is smaller and more frequent than it used to be. Foreign buyers and brand-management companies are the active acquirers. Other independent DTC brands mostly aren’t buying; they can’t afford to.
What that means for smaller, mission-driven retailers paying attention: The assumption that “if I build something meaningful, the right acquirer will eventually show up” is not safe anymore. The acquirers who are active right now are not, by and large, the ones who will preserve your values. So, you have to build for durability, not for an exit.
Lesonsky: What do you think smaller independent retail brands should take away from this moment?
Petit: A few things I’d say to any founder reading this:
Customers liking you is not the same as customers needing you. That gap is what kills mission-driven brands when the cost of acquiring a customer goes up. The brands that survive build something operationally that customers can’t easily replace, not just a story they enjoy.
Take the back end as seriously as the front end. Sourcing and packaging get attention. Returns, unsold inventory, and end-of-life don’t—until they show up as a write-off, a regulatory issue, or a reputational hit. The brands that get ahead of this now have options later.
Values create the first sale. Operations create the repeat. Mission isn’t a substitute for running a tight business. It’s a multiplier on top of one, if the business actually works.
Lesonsky: Is there still a viable market for brands that prioritize sustainability and transparency — or are consumers ultimately prioritizing convenience and price?
Petit: There’s a viable market. It’s just smaller and harder than the 2018 narrative made it sound.
Lesonsky: Five years from now, do you think the fashion industry will look more sustainable — or simply better at marketing sustainability?
Petit: Both — but unevenly, and the split is the interesting part.
Regulation is going to drag the floor up, whether brands want it to or not. EU rules, France’s anti-fast-fashion legislation, expanding disclosure requirements, and EPA regulations—these are forcing baseline changes that marketing can’t paper over. So the bottom of the industry will look more sustainable in five years, because it has to.
The top will split. A small group of brands will build genuine operational sustainability, circular models, real traceability, on-demand manufacturing, serious plans for returns, and unsold inventory. They’ll have better margins because they waste less. A bigger group will just get better at the appearance of it, more polished reports, better storytelling, and smarter PR.
The customers and regulators who can tell the difference between those two groups will decide which one wins. My honest take: The gap between real and performative sustainability will narrow on the marketing side and widen on the operational side. The brands that took the whole product life cycle seriously will be the ones still standing. The ones that didn’t will look like Everlane in 2026.
Rieva Lesonsky is the founder of Small Business Currents, a content company focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurship. You can find her on Twitter @Rieva, Bluesky @Rieva.bsky.social, and LinkedIn. Or email her at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.
