(Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago, we published Disney Petit’s insightful perspective on the Everlane sale to Shein. Because the sale was shocking to many, I am pleased to present another viewpoint, from a retailer.–Rieva)
I’ll be honest: when the Shein–Everlane news broke, my first reaction wasn’t shock. It was recognition. Industry coverage framed the deal as Shein buying a reputational bridge into Western markets. That’s true, but the acquisition also forces a harder conversation about Everlane itself.
Transparency Was Never a Business Model
Everlane made ethical sourcing legible. Factory photos, cost breakdowns, “radical transparency” as a value proposition. But ethical positioning alone proved fragile when cheaper alternatives closed the gap. The moment a lower-priced competitor offers something close enough, the consumer calculus shifts.
You can be as transparent as you want about how a garment was made. If it ends up contributing to the 92 million tons of textile waste the industry generates every year because it’s out of style or outgrown after a handful of wears, the supply-chain story doesn’t change where it lands.
The Illusion of Resale
The natural response from sustainability advocates is resale. It’s an understandable instinct: keep clothes in circulation longer and extend their useful life. But resale has a structural ceiling, especially in categories where the fast-fashion cycle is most intense.
I spent two years trying to solve kids’ clothing because it makes the problem obvious: my daughter will outgrow what she’s wearing in three months or less. Listing, photographing, shipping, those steps are often not worth the return for families already stretched thin. Peer-to-peer resale doesn’t change upstream production volumes; as long as production rates hold steady, the environmental math barely moves.
That’s why I built Circular Club around an access model: families choose pieces, wear them, and return them when they no longer fit, keeping the same garments cycling through multiple children instead of piling up after four wears. Access changes the incentives. When a garment must survive multiple users, quality becomes a financial requirement, not just a marketing claim. A garment that keeps moving between families never reaches the waste stream in the same way resale or recycling can claim, because those approaches still depend on overproduction happening first.
When Mission Meets Multiples
But there’s another layer to this story that I think about as a founder: capital and the pressure it brings. Building a mission-driven company is one thing. Keeping it mission-driven after years of investor expectations, growth targets, and exit pressures is something entirely different.
Michael Preysman [Everlane founder] wasn’t involved in the sale; he stepped away years earlier. This wasn’t one founder waking up and deciding to sell. It was the collision of mission and the economics of growth.
I understand why companies raise money. Growth costs money. Inventory costs money. Technology and teams cost money. Investors aren’t villains; they have a job to do. But the moment you take outside capital, you’re no longer just building a company, but an outcome. And eventually that outcome needs to return the fund’s investment multiple times over.
The decisions that are best for a mission are not always the decisions that maximize enterprise value. Investors may care about sustainability, but funds still need returns. If a founder defines success as serving customers well and staying independent for over 20 years, while a fund needs a 5x return in seven, those definitions of success will collide.
So, when I look at deals like this, I don’t only ask whether Everlane was truly sustainable or whether Shein can rehabilitate its reputation. I ask how many mission-driven companies eventually find themselves making choices they never imagined because the economics of venture-backed growth leave them with few alternatives.
Redefining Success in Sustainable Fashion
This is not a call to despair. There are durable, mission-aligned businesses: Eileen Fisher and Patagonia show the model can work at scale. But those businesses also demonstrate a different set of incentives, ones that don’t necessarily hand private equity a clean exit. The Shein–Everlane deal clarifies something important: sustainable aesthetics and transparency can win press and acquisition interest, but they don’t fix the underlying math of production and ownership.
The brands that will matter in the next decade are the ones whose business models require garments to stay in use longer and whose outcomes improve margins, not just press coverage. Ownership models are losing ground to access models across categories that have already made the shift. Fashion will not be the exception. It’s a slower build, but it’s the only version of this industry with somewhere left to go.
Maybe I’ll change my mind someday. Maybe I’ll take outside capital and find a way to square these tensions. But right now, I’d rather grow slower. I’d rather prove the model with customers before bringing in people who need the model to scale faster than I might otherwise choose. Because the more ownership you keep, the longer you get to decide what success actually means.
And for me, that’s worth a lot.
Vale Siegrist is a Sustainable Parenting Advocate and the Founder of Circular Club.
