Everlane launched 14 years ago as an ethical apparel brand extolling “radical transparency,” a term that it trademarked. This year, the company has shifted to a “clean luxury” message to elevate its image and focus on sustainability.

Advancing lower-impact, certified and mostly natural materials supports the company’s net zero goal for 2050 and hedges against future regulatory risks. The strategy also seeks to rebuild trust lost five years ago, after workers blasted Everlane for greenwashing and poor labor and social practices.

Steering Everlane forward is Alfred Chang, a former Fear of God and PacSun chief executive. Last October, he became Everlane’s third CEO since co-founder Michael Preysman stepped away in 2021.

Katina Boutis, the senior director of sustainability and sourcing who joined Everlane early in 2021, described the label as “moving from transparency of pricing to transparency of supply chain to a very robust and holistic view of sustainability across social and environmental impacts.”

For instance, the company is closing in on a goal of 100 percent “preferred” materials that eliminate virgin plastics by the end of this year, according to Boutis, previously the sustainability director at luggage maker Away. Ninety percent of Everlane’s materials in 2024 met such “lower-impact” standards, such as being organic, recycled or responsibly sourced. 

“We’ve proven over the years that we can build a strategy that is meaningful and also attain very lofty goals,” Boutis told Trellis.

Shifting recognition

“Everlane now stands out less for its marketing claims and more for the tangible steps it’s taking on materials, emissions and accountability,” said fashion industry veteran and consultant Liz Alessi.

The company recently topped a list of 52 brands in the 2024 Fashion Accountability Report by Remake, a San Francisco advocacy group.

External estimates, which the privately held Everlane declined to verify, peg its 2024 sales around $200 million or more, with 420 employees across six continents. Although not a brand leader by size, Everlane’s transparent and ethical selling points have invited scrutiny since its founding. 

It holds a longtime narrative of eliminating middlemen to sell finely crafted, timeless fashions directly to consumers at a markdown. Its graphic of the “true costs” of a garment went viral.

Tracing the trouble

Despite this focus, Everlane was from its earliest days subject to watchdog complaints that it was short on sustainability details. And those complaints paled next to a March 2020 tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who shamed the company after it had laid off hundreds of retail and customer support roles following attempts to unionize. 

That summer, former employees (self-described as the “Everlane Ex-Wives Club”) penned a public letter complaining of the company’s systemic racism and “convenient transparency.” 

Following an apology and investigation, Everlane changed leadership and began publishing annual impact reports.

Still, the company’s social responsibility disclosures fall short of being “radical,” according to Luke Smitham, a senior manager at Kumi Consulting in London.

“Currently they are very much within the pack but their communication tends to be more detailed and in some places refreshingly honest,” he said. For instance, the company explains why achieving living wages within its supply chain is very challenging, according to Smitham.

Material matters

Although the company declined to comment on past controversies, it is eager to discuss its progress on sourcing and manufacturing. Both are pivotal to hitting its net zero target, validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative. Sixty percent of the business’s climate footprint originates from materials, and 99 percent from Scope 3 sources.

Boutis described leading sustainability and sourcing across “a very tightly wound, cross-functional team.” She reports to a senior vice president who reports to Chang and the board.

“While many brands dabble in sustainable fabrics, Everlane has created a clear roadmap toward 100 percent preferred materials and tied it directly to science-based climate targets,” consultant Alessi said. “They’ve already achieved 90 percent of their materials meeting those standards and they’re one of the few brands close to fully sourcing sustainably. The choices they make in closing that final gap will define what true material leadership looks like in the industry.”

Everlane’s preferred materials ramp-up

Last year, the company counted an emissions drop of 52 percent per product unit against a baseline year of 2019 — close to the 2030 aim of 55 percent. So far, 95 percent of its cotton is either organic, regenerative, recycled or traceable back to the farm. Everlane invests in climate- and soil-friendly farming projects. In addition, all of Everlane’s virgin leather, manmade cellulosic fibers and down meet third-party standards. 

The company has switched 45 core materials to recycled versions, although 4 percent of its polyester and nylon still included virgin sources in 2024. Everlane originally sought to eliminate virgin plastics by 2021 for products and packaging, too. It succeeded with packaging, but moved the product goal to 2025.

“We see this less as pushing out a deadline and more as doubling down on a systems-level challenge,” Boutis said. After realizing that the hard-to-recycle items like zipper pulls, buttons and stretchy fabrics were an industry-wide problem, Everlane sought to support related startups.

In addition, 91 percent of the label’s goods were made under third party-certified chemicals standards, such as Oeko-Tex. And 78 percent of its Tier 2 mills, including for dyeing and finishing, had cleaner chemistry certifications.

“Once we achieve one goal or one milestone, we have to set our sights further,” Boutis said. “Sometimes, what we’ve noticed is that the solutions don’t even exist today.” That applies, for example, to Everlane’s participation with the Apparel Impact Institute in its efforts to help suppliers adopt low-emissions practices.

And although bottle-to-textile recycling may be the best “circular” solution so far, textile-to-textile recycling could be better. To that end, Everlane is partnering with Fiber Club, a multi-brand project by the startup Circ, to feature Circ’s recycled lyocell in a small 2026 collection.

Reducing plastic risks

The natural fiber-forward approach is also about risk reduction. Everlane actively supports policies, including the nation’s first extended producer responsibility law, which in California this year began requiring fashion brands to account for their sold merchandise. 

The company developed its first synthetics at the same time it devised materials targets in 2018. That shed light on the lifecycle impacts of polymer fibers, which Everlane limits to items like jackets with low rates of shedding. (Everlane lobbied for a California bill that would have required filters on washing machines.)

“It’s not just the public that is starting to really understand and grapple with the subject,” Boutis said of concerns about plastic pollution from fashion. “The industry and lawmakers in particular are on that same pathway.”

“We’ve been able to demonstrate that we’re making real, meaningful progress, whether it’s our climate commitments or material commitments,” Boutis said. “We are actually succeeding, both on the business end and the sustainability end, which I think many times are positioned as in opposition to one another.”

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The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

Throughout the past few months, we’ve discussed how to set sustainability strategy through an approach we call Sustainability Tension Management, which allows practitioners to adapt and operate fluidly in both the profit and loss culture of business and the policy and impact world of sustainability. But it’s always helpful to see what this strategy looks like in practice and we’ve gotten that opportunity by observing the UPS sustainability team led by chief sustainability officer Scott Childress.

Childress brings a unique profile to the CSO role. An economist by training, he spent most of his UPS career in the finance and accounting department, rising to serve as the CFO for specific business lines. Someone with Scott’s background represents a prime example of a business insider leading the function. Our research has found business insiders often lean towards making modest, incremental moves, while sustainability experts from outside of business frequently push for more ambitious impact.

While it may sound as if insiders’ lower ambition might make them less impactful, their ability to leverage business acumen, internal relationships and navigate corporate bureaucracy provides them with a set of Akido-like capabilities, where force is not met with force but by redirection.

These skills can drive tangible impact for people and profit, as we’ve seen with Childress and his team. Below are five lessons we’ve learned from UPS’ sustainability transformation.

Lesson 1: Use data to drive change

Disclosure and reporting processes, while essential, can make incredibly rich, varied and strategic emissions and energy data start to look and feel static and siloed. Our research finds the most successful sustainability leaders prioritize creating systems and processes that go beyond disclosures and foster the use of data to drive insight and impact for people, planet and profit. To advance this, the UPS Sustainability team moved away from ad hoc data management via Excel and centralized the data collection process, working with tech partners and the IT department to create a solution that fit UPS’s approach to information management.

Childress and his team intuitively understood that sustainability needs to align with the organizational culture and entrepreneurial style of UPS. At its heart, UPS manages logistics with an engineering firm’s approach: laser-focused on data-driven efficiency. “We view validated, high-confidence data as a huge enabler,” he said. That’s because robust data and analytics encourage decision makers to devote resources to improve energy performance and keep the company on track towards its 2050 carbon neutrality commitment.  

Lesson 2: Get data in the hands of the right decision makers

Too much sustainability data often remains visible only to a company’s sustainability team. Childress and his team saw that data collection was set up to respond to the requirements of specific government reporting standards. However, it was missing the opportunity to better inform internal operational decision makers.

The UPS team set up their group to serve as the central hub for all sustainability data, which they then translated into actionable, user-friendly, consistently updated formats for teams across the business. To affect decisions and behaviors of decision makers, the data needed to be “bilingual” and speak the language of the business in addition to the language of sustainability reporting standards, rating systems and regulatory requirements. The sustainability team made sure to connect with key internal stakeholders to understand what questions they wanted to answer, how frequently they wanted updates and what kind of analytic functionality would best support them.

Lesson 3: Help decision makers balance tensions and resolve tradeoffs

Childress’ own experience as CFO helped the sustainability team recognize that UPS decision makers wanted a data management system that would allow them to track emissions tied to financial and accounting modeling. While many GHG tracking tools support reporting and disclosure, this functionality was not readily available. “Instead of going to others to look at ROI on invested capital we used our own company models to build a cash flow model to determine how an option for reducing emissions would affect budget expenditures and financial outcomes such as reduced costs,” Childress recalled.

Doing so helped company leaders translate GHG data to familiar financial analytics. They could now understand GHG and energy from the lens of efficiency and treat GHG as a waste stream that needed management optimization. Now anyone who might not have ever heard of Science Based Targets could accelerate their evaluations and scenario analysis and make decisions regarding capital allocation that would drive financial and low carbon outcomes.

Lesson 4: Drive impact and business benefits

The outcome of the sustainability team’s work is an interactive data management tool that allows business leaders to get granular carbon and energy data by emission source. It enables leaders to craft scenarios that show the impact of changes on emissions and related costs and/or savings.

For example, the company’s European operations can monitor monthly consumption of ground fuels, natural gas, diesel and bio-based and renewable fuels in its vehicle fleets. The database taps into purchasing invoices to get location specific data on the amount of fuels purchased and consumed and then calculate GHG emissions. The data even shows miles driven and related emissions by location. The sustainability team can track every flight and the amount of fuel burned by route. Auditing teams constantly make sure the numbers are validated. In addition, the database helps UPS respond to customer request support in reducing GHG emissions tied to their supply chain and logistics.

Lesson 5: Shift the focus of accountability from inputs to impacts

The data management system, “gives us tremendous flexibility,” Childress said. “We can now implement initiatives and measure monthly to see how seasonality affects us, and to see if initiatives are effective. It was super important to start with the data and then the ecosystem possibilities came to life.”

The database has become an invaluable tool for leaders across the business to pull their weight in reducing emissions. Rather than reviewing data and brainstorming ways to reduce emissions on an annual basis, decision makers can review and trial actions on a monthly basis. In addition, decision makers can develop the knowledge and skillset to connect better GHG and energy management to enhanced business and financial results.

The data also helps decision-makers make more informed calculations regarding fuel choices as they compare fossil fuels with renewables, biofuels, hydrogen, electric and other options.

For example, if UPS shaves a minute off a process, the savings across a global company of around 490,000 employees is substantial. The GHG and energy database catalyzes innovative ideas that improve efficiency.

Sweet spot alignment

The UPS example shows the potential of adapting business thinking to sustainability and sustainability thinking to business. Sustainability practices can get caught up in an over-emphasis on tracking inputs. But the UPS story reminds us of how important it is to make the subtle but profound shift to set up systems and incentives that establish accountability for delivering positive results for people, planet and profit.

 

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It’s getting harder to build or maintain trust with diverse groups these days, so it’s no wonder people are turning to innovative methods to try to boost engagement.

But recent research conducted by GlobeScan and the Corporate Affairs Academy at the University of Oxford, finds that stakeholder engagement ranks among the top five priorities for corporate affairs professionals. At the same time, other GlobeScan research shows that many sustainability experts don’t see stakeholder management as a highly effective lever for advancing sustainability. This disconnect highlights a critical challenge: how can engagement be redefined to deliver trust and meaningful sustainability outcomes?

Corporate affairs practitioners surveyed say the most innovative ways to build trust with diverse groups is to return to the fundamentals, especially with stakeholders who are skeptical and critical: direct, in-person engagement and open dialogue, followed by clear communication and transparency. While digital tools and AI are part of the mix, they’re viewed as less powerful than authentic, human-centered approaches.

What this means

In a world of eroding trust and rising stakeholder expectations, organizations must focus on the quality of stakeholder engagement. By combining the relationship-building expertise of corporate affairs with the leadership of sustainability teams, companies can elevate engagement to drive credibility and impact. This means investing time in face-to-face dialogue to co-create solutions with stakeholders directly and, when possible, in person to ensure engagement not only builds and maintains trust but also contributes to tangible sustainability progress.

Based on a survey of 245 corporate affairs practitioners, February-March 2025.

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JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange in June, marking a comeback for a company that in 2020 had paid billions in fines to Brazilian and U.S. authorities to settle sweeping bribery and corruption cases. 

The rebrand included setting ambitious climate goals to appeal to ESG-focused investors: zero deforestation in its cattle supply from the Amazon by 2025 and net-zero emissions in its global operations — which span from Brazil to the U.S. and Australia — by 2040.

Four years later, though, the company’s plans still lack transparency and credibility, according to sustainability experts. Jason Weller, its global chief sustainability officer, told Reuters in January that JBS’s net-zero pledge “was never a promise,” but an “aspiration.” The Brazilian company hasn’t disclosed how much of its greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to land-use changes like deforestation, likely a significant source of its emissions, given that beef production accounts for more than three-quarters of the Amazon’s destruction.  

The meatpacker, which supplies McDonald’s, Walmart and other big retailers, reported small cuts to emissions between 2019 and 2023 and is investing in new tools to monitor its network of cattle farmers in Brazil. But those actions aren’t enough to meet its climate goals, according to environmental watchdogs, sustainable investment analysts and groups that evaluate corporate climate plans. They noted that JBS’s public listing in the U.S. means it can raise more cash from investors to help fund expansion into countries like Vietnam and Nigeria. Since June, JBS’s share price has risen to $15.60, an increase from its debut at nearly $14.

JBS didn’t respond to requests for comment. Chief Financial Officer Guilherme Cavalcanti told The Financial Times in June that it’s in the company’s interest to end deforestation “because we depend on the climate to have pasture for animals.”

Track record

In 2021, JBS was the first global meatpacker to announce a net-zero emissions goal. However, JBS’s net-zero plan now lags behind that of its peers, including Danone, Mars, Nestlé, and PepsiCo, according to an analysis by the NewClimate Institute in June. The think tank rated JBS’s strategy as “very poor,” citing little evidence that the company is embarking on deep emissions cuts. That would require shifting to more plant-based products, reducing fertilizer use and food waste, and eliminating deforestation. JBS hasn’t disclosed whether it will rely on carbon offsets to achieve its 2040 goal.

“Without major innovations to drastically reduce the emissions footprint of meat production or diversifying away from this highly GHG emissions-intensive industry, it is not credible for livestock agribusinesses to claim that they are on a path to deep decarbonization,” the NewClimate Institute said. 

JBS’s targets cover only Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which, even if achieved by 2030, would lead to a 1.1 percent overall reduction compared to 2019. That’s because 97 percent of JBS’s emissions are Scope 3 — the result of tens of thousands of individual farming operations and millions of consumers cooking, refrigerating and disposing of its products.

Biggest challenge: deforestation

JBS slaughters some 76,000 head of cattle a day from farms across the globe. In Brazil, it’s particularly difficult for agribusinesses to link cattle to deforested lands because the animals pass through many different farms before reaching the slaughterhouse, said Pablo Majer, conservation specialist at WWF-Brazil.

“The problem is those indirect suppliers, and meatpackers don’t have information on them,” Majer said. 

Brazil’s federal databases of land records and livestock movements aren’t interlinked and have quality issues, reported Angela Flaemrich, director of stewardship services for Morningstar Sustainalytics, who traveled to Brazil in October 2024 to engage with companies, including JBS, on behalf of institutional investors.

Satellites can show where trees are cleared, but not when cattle move or who owns the land. 

“I think JBS has put in a tremendous amount of work into this,” Flaemrich said, noting that the company traces direct suppliers — i.e., farms that are one step away from the slaughterhouse.

JBS created a Transparent Livestock Platform, which enables direct suppliers to submit information about the sources from which they purchased cattle. 

That doesn’t solve the problem of tracing cattle from birth, however, which would require a nationwide animal identification system using tags affixed to calves’ ears at birth, said Flaemrich. 

JBS has pilots underway, including with the government of Pará. The Brazilian state, which has some of the highest rates of deforestation in the Amazon, aims to tag all the cattle in the state by 2026. JBS said it will invest $43 million over three years to help farmers offset their costs.

Morningstar Sustainalytics gave JBS a “severe risk” rating on ESG issues. Sydney Krisanda, a research analyst, said the company has some strong initiatives to manage carbon within its own operations but continues to receive fines for sourcing cattle from deforested lands in Brazil.  

Political and economic realities

There likely won’t be deforestation-free cattle from Brazil until its largest customers demand it — namely, China, the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries like Egypt.

China buys about 40% of Brazil’s beef exports, Majer said, but the country is more interested in food security than ending deforestation. The U.S., the second-largest buyer, has rolled back its climate agenda under President Donald Trump. While the European Union is requiring traders to prove that cattle, soy, coffee and other imports don’t come from deforested land, the bloc is a relatively small customer for Brazil’s beef companies.

Between 2022 and 2024, the environmental watchdog groups Mighty Earth and AidEnvironment alerted JBS to more than 100 cases of deforestation in its cattle supply chain in the Amazon and Cerrado regions. JBS said the majority weren’t their suppliers, but provided no evidence to support those claims, Mighty Earth said.

Meanwhile, Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is focused on boosting the country’s economy, Majer said. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef and soybeans, and agribusiness accounts for about 25 percent of the country’s annual GDP.

“It’s very tricky to balance these two agendas, economic and the environment,” Majer said.

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Climate activist, academic and journalist Bill McKibben’s nonprofit 350.org convinced investors representing $40 trillion to divest from oil and gas companies over the past decade.

Now he’s using his voice and organizing platforms — 350.org and Third Act — to raise awareness about the “explosive spike” in renewable energy adoption around the world, especially electricity from the sun. 

McKibben’s latest book published in August — “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization” — offers a hopeful account of how solar power is lifting up communities in Africa, Pakistan and China and the rural U.S.

“We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun,” McKibben told me in the latest episode of Climate Pioneers. “That changes the dynamics in many, many ways and should be changing the decision-making for corporations. It certainly is around the world.”

New renewable generation added 585 gigawatts of power worldwide in 2024, up 15.1 percent from 2023. In the U.S., 90 percent of the additions came from renewables, including 39.6 gigawatts of solar power. There’s now enough solar capacity in the U.S. — about 220 gigawatts — to satisfy 7 percent of U.S. electricity demand.

That growth continues in the face of President Donald Trump’s intensifying assault on U.S. solar and wind development through executive orders, tax rule changes and permit revocations, said the 64-year-old author of more than 20 books about climate change.

Here are four highlights from our conversation:

Solar power, the ‘Costco of energy’

The Trump administration’s policies ignore the reality that developers and utilities can add solar and wind power to the U.S. electric grid more quickly than natural gas or nuclear plants — in months compared with five years or a decade, respectively. 

Corporations with climate commitments may sign clean power contracts to make emissions claims, but it’s also cheaper, McKibben said. For example, the levelized cost of solar energy was $61 per megawatt-hour in 2024, compared with $76 per megawatt-hour for natural gas.

“I have no idea why any business would want to pay more for a primary input like energy, especially when their competitors in other parts of the world are going to be paying less and less and less,” McKibben said. “This is a strategy, at the moment, for choking the American economy. We need some businesses willing to stand up and move against it wherever they can.” 

The fossil fuel industry has broadcast the idea that alternative electricity is more expensive, when the reality is no longer true. “We think of it as the Whole Foods of energy, nice but pricey,” he said. “It’s actually the Costco of energy now: it’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf, ready to go.”

A nationwide rally to highlight that narrative, Sun Day, is scheduled for the Sept. 21 autumnal equinox. 

Texas, the biggest installer

One place the message is getting through is Texas. Despite Republican lawmakers’ attempts to slow down renewables adoption in the state, Texas installed more solar electricity in 2023 and 2024 than any other state, including California. 

Texas is also installing energy storage technology at the quickest pace in the U.S., motivated to prevent catastrophic blackouts — such as a 2021 winter storm outage that left 4.5 million customers without power, some for days. The storage capacity tripled to 8.6 gigawatts in 2024, and is projected to reach almost 18 gigawatts this year.

“There was important lobbying done, often by corporate players,” McKibben said. “People do have to begin standing up to the fossil fuel industry in one state house after another, and figuring out how to make it easier for this transition to happen.”

Utah, the unlikely disruptor 

Permitting reform is one of the biggest places where corporate support can make an important difference, McKibben said, pointing to Utah as an example of what’s possible.

In early July, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed a new law that allows individuals to quickly install small solar arrays — less than 1,200 watts — without having to go through the trouble of getting an interconnection agreement. The legislation, modeled after a policy in Germany that gave apartment dwellers the right to hang solar panels off their balconies, had unanimous bipartisan support. 

China, the first ‘electrostate’

For other inspiring solar adoption stories, look to developing countries such as Pakistan, where citizens built almost half the capacity of the nation’s electric grid on their own in the span of a year — with very little help from the government or utilities. 

But the country poised to benefit the most from solar adoption is China, which McKibben calls the world’s first “electrostate.”

In May, the last month for which data is available, China installed three gigawatts of solar power on a daily basis — roughly three coal-fired power plants. It’s still approving coal plants, too, but solar and wind installations now outpace the growth of fossil fuels.

China has a good use for that low-cost electricity: keeping electric vehicles (EVs) on the road. Close to half the cars sold in China in July came with a plug, threatening the dominance of the U.S. automotive industry.

Both solar and EVs got their start in the U.S., but Trump’s policies put the U.S. at a significant disadvantage during a crucial moment in the low-carbon economy transition. 

“What we’re doing at this moment in this country is serving up our lunch to China. I’m afraid that unless we act very quickly we’re going to be also-rans,” McKibben said.

Watch the whole Bill McKibben conversation. Be the first to read about upcoming Climate Pioneers episodes with senior sustainability professionals from PepsiCo, Yum! Brands and Patagonia by signing up for the Trellis Briefing newsletter.

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