2023 was a big year for Everlane in “lots of ways,” Katina Boutis, the San Francisco-headquartered firm’s director of sustainability, shared a few days before it released its latest impact report—its third, to date.
While the public kudos for its behind-the-scenes efforts have been affirming—the Glossy Fashion Awards named Everlane the Sustainable Brand of 2023, and Remake gave the elevated basics purveyor the No. 1 spot in its Fashion Accountability Report—the work itself has been its own reward. In 2023, Everlane shrank its per-product carbon impact by 24 percent, resulting in a 38 percent reduction in absolute Scope 1-3 emissions relative to a 2019 baseline, “so a really huge amount of progress,” she said.
The consistently downward trajectory—barring emissions from 2020, which Covid-19 squelched industry-wide—was the result of a purposeful strategy to “get the greatest reductions in the fastest amount of time,” particularly with the Scope 3 emissions that comprise 99 percent of Everlane’s total greenhouse gas footprint, Boutis said. This meant making “deliberate changes” to aspects of the supply chain within its direct control, including tinkering with different materials, snipping transportation routes, co-locating raw materials and manufacturing operations and championing design quality over product quantity.
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Everlane will continue making tweaks, she said, but as it “maxes out on those areas of opportunity,” it also wants to tackle parts of Scope 3 that it has less authority over but can still nudge in the right direction. It’s a new set of challenges, Boutis said, but one that it will be grappling with in tandem with industry groups such as the Apparel Impact Institute and Cascale in order to propagate carbon reduction measures that maximize energy efficiency or eliminate the use of coal, even though those investments may not be as dramatically reflected in its own carbon ledger.
“There’s a whole subset where we don’t have direct control over decisions,” she said. “So we’re really going to have to work within our supplier network, on our partnerships, on our incentives, on shared financing and investment to address where our hotspots are from a manufacturing perspective and to start to build in efficiency measures…and move to renewables. So we have a lot of work ahead of us.”
If you’re hearing more of Everlane in the regulatory space, that’s on purpose, too. In 2023, Everlane supported California’s first climate disclosure laws throughout the legislative process. And that’s on top of previously endorsing the New York Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act and the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change or FABRIC Act.
Making sure every company meets the same minimum social and environmental standards is important to a company whose three pillars are “keep Earth clean,” “keep Earth cool” and “do right by people.” At the same time, tax breaks or other government incentives could help smaller, privately owned companies like Everlane implement measures that might be cost-prohibitive or overly ambitious. Boutis noted, for instance, that the label makes up “way less” than 10 percent of any supplier’s production in a given year, so it has to “get creative,” often through “old-fashioned face-to-face conversation.” Regulation could give more enterprises a fairer shot.
“I think as much as we have absolutely seen a change in ourselves and also in our industry over the past few years, it’s not going fast enough, so if what it takes to kind of spur change and hold ourselves accountable is policy, then [we’re all for it],” she said. We don’t want to be the only ones [making an effort.] If it’s going to work, it needs to be on a much broader scale.”
One of Everlane’s biggest levers for change, which has been a focus for the “past couple of years,” is making the switch from conventional or virgin materials to preferred or lower-impact versions based on recognized industry standards and full supply chain transparency. With the addition of Good Earth’s regenerative cotton, ZQRX’s regenerative wool, European flax linen and so-called Good Cashmere over the past year, it’s now 80 percent of the way there, meaning that this is still a work in progress.
Transportation is another pressure point. Everlane has already curtailed air shipments of raw materials and finished products to less than 5 percent of total freight. It’s also been “strategically manoeuvering” its upstream value chain to have processes closer together. This requires sourcing and product development teams to be on the same page. If the “right hand isn’t talking to the left hand,” Boutis said, it could easily end up sourcing fiber in one country, weaving it into fabric in another and sewing garments “somewhere totally different.”
“We’ve spent a lot of time co-locating and consolidating our vendor base so that we have more of those opportunities for efficiencies, which of course also have a ton of other benefits around speed and timing in addition to environmental [ones],” she said.
The B Corp hopeful also “incentivizes” its customers to choose ground freight for orders and returns by making five-to-eight-day “no-rush” shipping free, Boutis said. Three-to-five-day “standard” shipping costs $6.95 and two-to-three-day “express” shipping rings up another $19.95.
But change isn’t easy, as Everlane has found. Case in point: plastic. In 2018, the Marque’ Almeida collaborator touted its desire to remove virgin polyester and nylon from its supply chain by 2021. So far it has achieved 98 percent of the target, which it has pushed back to 2025. Elastane has been tough to replace, Boutis said, even though Everlane is trialing “some innovative alternatives,” including versions that are partially recycled, Cradle to Cradle or rubber-based. So has the small amount of virgin fiber that is sometimes needed to create the right mix of performance and durability in items like swimwear and activewear, where stretch and recovery are paramount.
“This might be one of those things that are borderline impossible to achieve, but we’re not giving up on it,” she said. “We’re still really trying.”
The brand has had more success with making the leap from virgin polybags to recycled LDPE alternatives, which it’s, in turn, phasing out in favor of Forestry Stewardship Council-certified paper vellum envelopes.
In 2023, 65 percent of Everlane’s finished materials by volume met cleaner chemistry certifications such as Bluesign, Global Organic Textile Standard and Global Recycled Standard, a 3 percent year-over-year decrease that the report blamed in part on supply chain challenges and changes in its product assortment.
“We are in the process of making improvements with our newer suppliers, and expect to see continued improvements in 2024 and beyond,” it said.
A 2020 promise to use only organic cotton has, meanwhile, turned into a wash. With certified organic cotton making up roughly 1.4 percent of total cotton production, according to Textile Exchange, garnering the volumes it needs has been challenging, particularly in a geopolitical climate that makes Chinese cotton virtually verboten, Boutis said. (Everlane has endorsed the Coalition to End Uyghur Forced Labour’s call to action.) Organic cotton still makes up 67 percent of its total cotton use, followed by conventional cotton at nearly 16 percent, Supima traceable cotton at 7.9 percent, regenerative cotton at 7.2 percent and recycled cotton at 2 percent.
It is perhaps telling, therefore, that the report is subtitled, “Progress is a process.” Progress isn’t linear, Everlane said. Even then, it admitted, it “won’t always meet our own goals.”
And there’s still much to celebrate. Everlane has made an “incredible amount of progress in a very short amount of time,” which demonstrates that many things are indeed possible, Boutis said. She’s especially proud of the brand’s work with climate reduction, which she says has a “reverberating effect” on a number of impact areas.
“We’re very proud of a lot of very strong progress points,” she added. “It’s always nice whenever you reach a point where you feel like you’ve got a good headstart and you can take a moment to honor it. But in this field of sustainability, the goalposts are ever-changing. We’re never quite done with our work.”