Everlane’s third impact report began with a simple statement: “progress is a process.”
A year later, the B Corp hopeful hasn’t changed its tune—though a small reminder was tacked onto the concept for Everlane’s fourth annual impact report: “we’re leading the way.”
“Having these moments of reflection—really taking a step back and thinking this is possible, it is working—we can then not just celebrate progress made, but also show the industry that this is possible; if a brand of our size can do it, we want to be that proof-point,” Katina Boutis, Everlane’s senior director of sustainability and sourcing, told Sourcing Journal. “We also want to extend this collaborative spirit to show that we cannot do it alone. We’ve been able to do a lot, but we can’t transform this industry by ourselves.”
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“The more you know, the more you get exposed to things, you can’t unknow what you didn’t know before,” Boutis said. “That’s really to the credit of the brand and the way we set up and established our mission to be very core to the work we’re doing.”
That work is translated into Everlane’s fourth annual report, broken into three chapters based on the brand’s core pillars, to underline the job done and underscore the work ahead.
In 2024, 90 percent of materials met Everlane’s lower-impact, preferred standards—those recycled, organic, responsible or FSC-certified, with the percentage quantified by the volume of certified materials sourced out of the total amount used. While Everlane’s 2020 promise to only use organic cotton turned into a wash, 95 percent of cotton was certified organic, regenerative, recycled or fully traceable.
“We are prioritizing the areas within our impact scope that are driving those reductions the fastest.,” Boutis said. “Our material commitments, targeting materials with quantifiably and measurably lower impacts; it’s interrelated with everything we do.”
From such strategic prioritization efforts, Everlane cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 52 percent since 2019—putting the FABRIC Act endorser well ahead of its 2030 climate target.
“We’re not just on track,” Boutis said. “We’re outperforming and outpacing.”
The growth in emissions reduction—improved just over a third against last year’s 38 percent—stems from a focused push on low-impact materials, shipping shifts and supplier collaboration. In 2024, the company built upon previous efforts to address Scope 3 emission sources, partnering with the Manufacturer Carbon Action Program (MCAP) and Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) to “encourage, influence, and incentivize” suppliers on carbon tracking and reduction.
And while the brand is a small part of any given supplier’s volume (less than 10 percent), Boutis said these changes could have ripple effects industry-wide. Extending this philosophy further, Everlane sees supplier engagement not as a top-down mandate but as a collaborative journey.
“Nobody wants to be doing badly,” Boutis said, underscoring the brand’s philosophy of leading with education and empathy rather than pressure. As reflected in co-financed sustainability programs and regular supplier engagement, this partnership-promoting model has seemingly paid off in more than emissions reductions: spanning trust, transparency and tertiary alignment.
“We get the interesting challenge of: how do we design into this new, innovative material? And bring it to market?” said Boutis. “Thinking through new ways of operating and new ways of collaborating is something that’s really exciting to us; we just have that spirit built into our foundation.”
While not inked into its playbook, Everlane treats innovation like a scientific process—testing ideas, accepting failure, and learning as it goes—Boutis said, noting Everlane’s “natural evolution” toward a “really holistic approach” on ESG. Take, for example, Everlane’s involvement with Fiber Club.
The San Francisco-based brand joined the Fashion for Good and Canopy-backed collaborative initiative (centered around Circ’s next-gen recycled lyocell) as an inaugural member. Accompanying Bestseller, Eileen Fisher and Zalando, Everlane participated in the cohort’s first project incorporating Circ’s poly-cotton textile waste-based fibers into products.
In helping Circ scale, Everlane hopes to benefit from a “streamlined process that simplifies supply chain integration and lowers financial barriers” to implement innovative ideas.
“You have to be able to do that in a way that [consumers] don’t need a PhD to understand what you’re talking about,” Boutis said. “But you also don’t want to minimize or kind of dumb it down to the point of it being trivialized.”
True to Everlane’s evolution, the Poshmark initiative was built over several years. It was born, Boutis said, from the Marque’ Almeida collaborator’s partnership with Debrand. Everlane originally entered a multi-year initiative with the next-life logistics company in 2021 to understand what happens to returns. Per the findings of that two-year pilot, Everlane studied resale trends and product quality through both physical and online resale partners.
This is what led the Poshmark partnership, as the Loop partner’s platform emerged as the most aligned to Everlane’s needs.
“We’ve been able to test a lot of things, and that program is still ongoing today,” said Boutis, noting the program has been an internally celebrated success, yielding “an incredible pickup of excitement and engagement” despite only being up and running since February.
“We’re really excited as it’s just another way that we’re building out our circular offerings and our story of how we’re trying to approach the subject in the long term,” she continued.
The initiative ties into Everlane’s broader circularity efforts and public support for California’s SB707, a bill to regulate textile recycling and producer responsibility.
“Whenever you think about all these things as being very interconnected to one another—this was the next, natural step,” Boutis said. “We’re trying to just demonstrate that we’re here as partners, and we are going to help this be important to you in whatever way we can.”
