Quick Take

Is it Possible to Grow Without Sacrificing Sustainability?

May 28, 2026

When Shein acquired Everlane, the founder of the brand described the buyer as “the antithesis of what we stood for in many ways.” The mismatch between a brand that emphasized its ethics and a company that embodies many failures of fast fashion is notable and raises a larger question: how companies that make sustainable and ethical commitments can maintain them under pressure created by investment and acquisition.

Founded in San Francisco in 2011, Everlane was supposed to be a “next-generation Gap” offering consumers “radical transparency” and sustainable products. The brand was one of several founded around the same time that marketed themselves to socially and environmentally conscious customers by publicizing commitments to recyclable plastic and workers’ quality of life. The brand also promised transparency, first on pricing and production, and then on working conditions and the company’s environmental footprint. Everlane aimed to meet millennial buyers where they were by providing quality basics at a reasonable price, with millennial values in mind.

In the midst of the pandemic, however, the company started to face significant challenges. In 2020, employees spoke out about alleged anti-Black behavior, union busting, and a toxic workplace culture. An internal investigation corroborated some of the allegations, and Preysman left the company.

At the same time, L Catterton, the LVMH-linked private equity firm, offered Everlane an $85 million investment based on a reported $550 million valuation. That infusion came with a familiar expectation: growth. Everlane did what growth-stage brands do in hope of a payoff: expanded categories, deepened inventory, and turned to brick-and-mortar stores after years of saying it never would. But those efforts failed to translate into significant revenue boosts, and in March of this year, it was reported that L Catterton and Everlane CEO Alfred Chang were looking for an investor to help with the company’s $90 million in debt.

Seeing this opportunity, Shein bought Everlane. Shein is notorious for admitting to finding children working in its factories in China, mandating excessive overtime for workers, and paying inadequate wages. It has also faced accusations that it sources cotton from China’s Xinjiang region, where Uyghurs have been detained, tortured, and forced to work. And in 2024, Grist reported that Shein is the highest-emitting company in the fashion industry.

While Everlane’s CEO, Alfred Chang, told the New York Times that Everlane intends to keep its “sustainability commitments,” many in the industry are understandably skeptical. Everlane did not reply to our request for further detail on how it plans to do so.

Everlane is certainly not the only company abandoning its ethical and sustainability commitments. But its story raises important questions about how brands can preserve such commitments when they are acquired by larger companies without similar commitments and when they receive funding from investors that do not prioritize ethical and sustainable decision-making.

The rapid growth and aggressive efficiency expectations of private equity investment often conflict with the goals of companies that seek to prioritize ethical and sustainable business practices. These measures of success can leave insufficient time to realize returns on responsible business decisions, such as those which enable better worker retention and a smaller carbon footprint. As Maxine Bédat has argued, institutional capital often forces sustainability to take a backseat to short-term investor returns—an effect which is amplified by the fact that institutional investors typically fail to understand the centrality of culture to a brand’s success. Everlane’s founder acknowledged this in his interview with Sherman, saying they lost their way “because we got so focused on trying to expand,” and announcing the launch of a new entity based on the “same principles, but this time no venture capital, no private equity.”

Indeed, a meaningful commitment to sustainability requires real investment, and can impact profitability, especially up front. As Dorothée Baumann-Pauly and Justine Nolan argue in their forthcoming work, Transforming Business – Aligning Profits With Human Rights (Routledge, forthcoming 2026), it also requires designing the business so that human rights and environmental concerns are embedded into core business practice. Companies too often try to retrofit human rights commitments onto existing operations, reducing them to procedural add-ons that leave central decision-making and processes unchanged. Advancing human rights requires aligning commercial objectives with societal ones, not layering the language of responsibility over a growth-at-all-costs structure.

Beyond questioning whether Everlane should have chased growth at all costs, we need to ask ourselves whether the capital available to mission-driven brands—PE money from LVMH, VC firms optimized for exits—is compatible with the values those brands were built on. If they’re not, what does values-aligned capital actually look like and where does it come from? Do we need different funders, different governance structures, different definitions of success? Everlane set out to prove that fashion could be more transparent and more humane. Ending up in Shein’s portfolio shows that good intentions, without the right structural foundations, aren’t enough.

Global Labor