You cannot fundraise your way to good values
Everlane, a sustainable brand, has just been sold to Shein.
The brand that built its whole identity on transparency and ethical factories, the one that told you exactly what your t-shirt cost to make and where it was stitched, is being absorbed by one of the most aggressive fast-fashion operators in the world. The deal values Everlane at around $100 million, and it is being sold by its majority owner, the private equity firm L Catterton. It was first reported by Puck and has since been confirmed across the trade press.
I wasn’t shocked when I read it. After two decades in this industry, I have watched this same story play out more times than I can count, and it is worth saying out loud what is really going on, because there is a lesson in it for every founder who wants to build something good.
Two brands built on values. The same ending.
The same week, I found myself thinking about Allbirds. The wool-shoe darling that was worth around $4 billion at its 2021 float. This year it sold its brand and intellectual property for $39 million to a brand-management firm that also owns Aerosoles, and the listed company is winding down. Then, in the strangest twist of all, what was left of Allbirds announced it was leaving footwear altogether to become an AI company called NewBird AI, and the share price leapt. A brand that once stood for sustainable design, stripped for parts and repackaged as an artificial-intelligence play to chase a quick bump in the stock.
Here is what they have in common, and it is not complicated. The values became the marketing. Growth became the only number anyone actually cared about. And the founders were handed enormous amounts of money long before they had the experience to spend it well.
Everlane’s founder, Michael Preysman, has been open about this. He came from private equity, not fashion, and by his own account knew almost nothing about making clothes when he started. His famous launch generated 60,000 email subscribers in five days, for shirts he did not yet have in stock. The demand, and then the venture capital, arrived because of a number on a screen, not because anyone had yet learned how to make and ship a genuinely good product. The expertise was supposed to come later. Often it never does.
The trap is structural, not personal
This is the trap, and it is structural, not personal. The moment you take serious institutional money, you are obligated to serve that money. Your job is no longer to make the best possible product as carefully as you can. Your job is to grow, quickly, so the return arrives on schedule. The values slide quietly into the brand deck. The mission becomes a mood board. And when the numbers stop adding up, you sell to whoever will write the cheque, even if it is the exact kind of company you set out to stand against.
When the entire game becomes turning ten pounds into a million as fast as you can, we are setting ourselves up to fail, as businesses and as a species.
I think about all of this as a human being, not only as a producer. If instead we slowed down and asked the real questions, do we actually need this, how is it made, where, and by whom, we would build things that last and look after the people and the planet who make them. That is not naïve. It is the only version of this industry with a future.
How I work, and why
It is also how I work. At BRL I have spent years building the opposite kind of business. We start with the product and the people who make it, never with a valuation. The right supplier is the gold mine, not the buyer. Quality is checked piece by piece, on the ground, by teams I trust. Relationships are counted in years, not quarters, which is how I have stayed a production partner to institutions like the V&A for a decade. None of that scales overnight, and it was never meant to.
Through DesignerFriday we are trying to pioneer a different model entirely, one where doing right by people and the planet is the point, not the press release. Because the brands genuinely building a better future are rarely the ones raising hundreds of millions on a viral moment. They are smaller, steadier, often underfunded. Experienced. Careful with money. A great many of them women. People quietly making a living by making a difference.
The encouraging part is that the lesson is there for all of us. Even Preysman, by recent reports, now wants to build an Everlane 2.0 with no venture capital or private equity behind it at all. He seems to have arrived, the hard way, at the thing two decades in this industry teaches you: you cannot fundraise your way to good values. You have to make them, the same way you make everything else worth having. Properly.
Let’s talk
If you are building a brand and you want to do it the right way, getting the product, the making and the people right before anything else, that is the work I love most. Let’s talk.
