Shein收购Everlane：千禧一代乐观主义的终结

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I love the fit, the comfort.

Basic style, good quality.

You might know the clothing company Everlane [music] for its plain tees, sensible work pants, millennial cool basics. Or you might know it more by reputation.

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The brand's marketing has always touted its commitment to quality, sustainability, and to transparent pricing. [music] These days, Everlane isn't the retail darling it once was. It's laden with [music] debt and struggling to connect with customers the way it did in the mid-2010s. But outside the company store in Lower Manhattan in early June, customers told us Everlane's stated [music] values are a big part of the reason they've kept shopping there.

They mostly use pretty good material that it will last.

They branded as, you know, radically sustainable, and they're also transparent about where they source their clothes from.

But that last customer, Anupriya Agarwal, said she might [music] reconsider shopping at Everlane.

When I found out that it's been acquired by Shein, which is like this mega um fast fashion brand outlet, it was very appalling to me.

Shein, the e-commerce giant founded in China, bought Everlane last month from [music] its private equity owner. The sale price, a reported $100 million. Shein is a king of fast fashion. As of 2022, [music] it released about a thousand new women's clothing styles every day, leading to concerns that its clothes aren't [music] just fast fashion, but low quality and disposable. In addition to its environmental impact, the company has also come under scrutiny for the labor conditions of its suppliers.

In some ways, Shein seemed like [music] the anti-Everlane.

I mean, I just have questions around why they decided to uh sell to Shein. It just doesn't align like value-wise, you know.

Many other Everlane customers [music] had a similar reaction.

Wake up, babe. Everlane apparently is selling to Shein for $100 million. This is my last straw.

What do you mean one of the most controversial [music] fast-fashion brands is acquiring, allegedly, a brand that's a leader in ethical, sustainable, modern consumerism?

The internet seemed to echo with wait, what?

It was in some ways great to know that that many people cared.

That's Michael Preysman, who co-founded Everlane back in 2011. He stepped down as CEO in 2021 and [music] left the company's board in January 2026. When he heard about the sale, he called up another former board member. [music]

I don't think either of us expected that kind of a reaction because in many ways Everlane had lost its way in the past few years.

Even if you don't really shop there anymore, like what probably stays with you from Everlane as a brand is the fact that they did have this sort of like ethical consumer ethos.

Amanda Mull is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

And people who sort of took that at face value, or even people who were like mildly skeptical of it, were shocked that Everlane, that the people in charge of it would say, "All right, we're going to sell this to the highest bidder, even if the highest bidder is sort of the opposite of the original Everlane promise."

I'm Sarah Holder, [music] and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Everlane, Shein, and why retail [music] can't bank on millennial optimism anymore. Everlane launched in San Francisco in the 2010s, during the early days of a direct-to-consumer boom. And Bloomberg's Amanda Mull says, "Right away, it found its audience."

It designed clothes that were very much targeting like a young white-collar woman who like cared about the stuff she bought and wanted high-quality basics in like a sort of design-forward, well-considered type of style. So, um

Yeah, it felt like a very millennial brand. I was living in San Francisco and there was one right on Valencia Street and I would always like wander in to the very stark, basic, white building.

Yeah, sort of like a like the aesthetic was was somewhat like Apple Store for clothing.

Exactly.

But when it launched, Everlane [music] wasn't a brick-and-mortar store. It was a website built around [music] an idea.

It was the Obama era, you know, it was after the Great Recession. You had millennials as a a huge consumer generation coming into the workplace, sort of starting to grow up a little bit into adulthood, and you have like a generation of idealistic young people who were looking to express their values however was possible. Everlane saw this generation and went, "We could tell them how clothes are made. We could help them feel good about the choices they're making."

Everlane's [music] co-founder, Michael Preysman, says the goal was to be more open about how clothing moved through supply chains and what that actually costs.

We started with a t-shirt and then grew into a full array of product and then moved from pricing transparency to factory transparency to sustainability.

Often there was like a little picture of workers theoretically at those factories on the website. This sweater was from a factory in China. This pair of shoes was from a factory in Vietnam.

It was an innovative approach at the time. And for a while, it worked. So well that the company expanded into retail stores with that Apple Store for clothing vibe. So, what changed? What brought Everlane to the point where it sold itself to Shein?

Well, I think the first issue you have is the pandemic. So, you had a population, especially among Everlane's target market, which is people who work laptop jobs, people who do knowledge work, people who could work from home and did not need office clothes anymore. And that's really what Everlane was known for is like like a nice pair of clothes that you could go to the office, you could go to lunch. They did not really emphasize like comfortable things to wear at home in leisure time.

So, like a lot of other apparel brands, their sales just really had a difficult time.

The second issue, beyond the types of products they were selling, was consumer behavior. Shoppers became more price sensitive and maybe more cynical.

People become, you know, sort of disillusioned of the ethical consumer idea because people, I think some of them, especially people in this demographic, learn more about like how the apparel industry actually works and get sort of sick of trying to mediate the risks and the downsides of it themselves.

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Everlane made several attempts to turn things around. In 2020, the company took on a private equity investor backed by French luxury fashion house LVMH and took out loans meant to help the company grow. There were also leadership changes, including Preisman's departure.

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But as Everlane floundered, another retail model was on the rise.

It's easy to see the allure of fast fashion. Well, you may have heard of Shein. It is an online fast fashion brand known for its trendy styles and its cheap [music] prices.

Shein is built on not necessarily like ideas or design, but on logistics. It is a company built by looking at where there might be inefficiencies in the traditional way that fashion is sold to create margin where there hadn't been before, while also lowering prices in a way that hadn't been possible before. So, you get a company that like is not going to tell you much about where its clothing is made, where each design was made, that you know, uploads to its website like on some days thousands of new new pieces that you can shop from, that have no one particular design ethos, no one particular brand ethos except cheap and fast.

Shein has faced allegations of using forced labor in its supply chain and has been sued for copyright infringement. A spokesperson for Shein told us that the company complies with the relevant laws and regulations in each market we operate in. In response to allegations of copyright infringement, the spok

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