Everlane built its entire brand on three promises: Keep earth clean. Keep earth cool. Do right by people. It was the fashion label you could feel good about buying from.
Now, a deal to sell Everlane has been struck with notorious fast fashion Chinese brand Shein for $100 million. The sale was reportedly approved last Saturday. [1]
This is the same Shein that couldn’t tell a parliamentary committee where its cotton comes from. The same Shein whose supply chain has been linked to the forced labor of over one million detained Uyghurs in the Uyghur Region of China. And the same Shein that Freedom United has been fighting to hold accountable.
When promises have a price
This acquisition doesn’t just raise eyebrows—it demands answers. Everlane was reportedly carrying around $90 million in debt, and its CEO had been seeking investors as recently as March. So perhaps the financial pressure makes the decision understandable—but does it make it acceptable?
Choosing to sell to Shein specifically—a company whose supply chain is mired in forced labor allegations, whose transparency record is virtually non-existent, and whose “thousands of independent audits” couldn’t even produce a straight answer to MPs about whether Uyghur cotton is banned from their supply chain—is a choice. And it’s a choice that betrays every customer who ever paid a premium for the Everlane label because they believed it meant something.
And this isn’t Everlane’s first brush with human rights concerns. In 2019, when a group of remote customer service workers attempted to unionize with the Communications Workers of America to demand better pay and benefits, Everlane responded by laying off the majority of those workers, and the company was accused of union-busting.
So perhaps the ‘Do Right By People’ promise always had its limits. But if Everlane’s record on human rights was already complicated, the company they’ve chosen to align with takes it to another level entirely.
The real cost of Shein’s ‘super deals’
Behind every rock-bottom price tag is a supply chain. And for Shein, that supply chain has been linked to the forced labor of Uyghurs in northwest China.
And it goes deeper than most people realize.
China has quietly evolved its use of forced labor through so-called labor transfer schemes—moving tens of thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to factories thousands of miles away across eastern China. The tactic is deliberate: spread the tainted workforce far and wide, and tracing forced labor through a supply chain becomes nearly impossible. More than a hundred global brands have already been linked to factories using labor ‘recruited’ through these schemes.
The word “recruited” does a lot of heavy lifting here. As Laura Murphy, former senior policy adviser to the Biden administration on Uyghur forced labor, put it:
When a government official knocks on the door of a Uyghur person and says they should take a job far from home, the person knows this is not merely a request.
Refusal, according to Murphy, is punishable by detention.
That’s the system Shein operates in. And that’s what Everlane just aligned itself with.
What you can do
This acquisition is a gut punch to Everlane’s conscious consumers—but it’s also a wake-up call. The “ethical fashion” label cannot be a shield that companies pick up and put down as it suits them. Accountability has to mean something.
We must demand that businesses own what happens in their supply chains—not just when it’s convenient, but as a legal and enforceable obligation. Voluntary commitments and self-reported audits clearly aren’t enough. Regulators and investors need to enforce genuine supply chain transparency: traceability, third-party verification, and real consequences for companies that look the other way.
Shein has faced accusations spanning forced labor, toxic chemicals in its products, and environmental harm[2]—and yet here it is, adding another brand to its portfolio.
Freedom United’s campaign to free Uyghurs from forced labor is ongoing. We’ve already made noise loud enough for regulators to take note. Now, with Shein’s reach growing and its reputation laundering accelerating, the pressure has never been more urgent.
We’ve seen what collective action can do. Let’s not stop now. Sign the petition.
Sources:
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/us/money/everlane-acquisition-shein-sustainability-b2978686.html
[2] https://www.greenpeace.de/engagieren/nachhaltiger-leben/shein
I had shopped at SHEIN because I liked the looks and the prices. Then, I learned about how they had used a swastika and how their labor was mostly forced. I stopped purchasing from them!