If you haven’t known by now, SHEIN drove shockwaves across the fashion industry when it announced it was acquiring US apparel retailer Everlane, once known as millennials’ go-to sustainable brand.
Why Everlane
Everlane is a San Francisco-based clothing retailer that built its brand identity around “radical transparency” — the idea of showing customers the true costs behind their products and the factories where they’re made, in contrast to traditional fashion retail’s opacity around sourcing and markups. It sells basics and casualwear (t-shirts, denim, outerwear, shoes) primarily direct-to-consumer online.
On sustainability, Everlane’s main pillars have included:
Material choices: shifting toward recycled and lower-impact materials, including recycled polyester, organic cotton, and Tencel, with a stated ambition (announced some years back) to eliminate virgin plastic from its supply chain — a goal it has acknowledged missing on its original timeline.
Factory transparency: publishing profiles of the factories it works with, including details on working conditions, wages, and audits, as part of its broader transparency marketing.
Carbon and packaging: efforts to reduce packaging waste and offset or reduce carbon emissions in shipping and production.
It’s worth noting that Everlane, like many “sustainable fashion” brands, has faced scrutiny and criticism over the years — questions about labor practices at some factories, a unionisation dispute with corporate staff, and general skepticism in the fashion press about how much “radical transparency” translates into verified environmental impact versus marketing positioning.
Everlane was purchased by fast-fashion giant SHEIN in a $100 million deal used to absolve roughly $90 million in Everlane debt. CEO Alfred Chang said Everlane would remain an “independent brand” under SHEIN and would uphold its “sustainability commitments.” The reaction from sustainable-fashion fans was strong: one fashion academic called it a brand “founded on ethical consumption” now sold to “the complete opposite of what SHEIN stands for,” and Good On You’s own ratings underline the gap — it scores Everlane as “good” while flagging Shein as a brand to avoid entirely
The climate newsletter HEATED went further, arguing the acquisition isn’t really about Everlane’s substance at all — its analysis suggested Shein didn’t buy an eco-friendly company so much as an eco-friendly image, predicting Shein would use the brand to help launder its reputation, while still crediting Everlane with real measurable progress — a reported 42% cut in per-product emissions and a 60% drop in absolute Scope 1–3 emissions versus its 2019 baseline by 2025.
Why is SHEIN hiring a sustainability director in Singapore
SHEIN is headquartered in Singapore — it relocated its corporate base there several years ago as part of a broader push to distance itself from its Chinese manufacturing origins and present a more neutral, global corporate identity, partly ahead of an eventually-stalled IPO plan that was targeting London and other listings.
So roles like the Associate Director, Public Affairs (Sustainability) and Senior Associate (Sustainability) – Public Affairs postings showing up in Singapore are simply core corporate functions sitting at HQ, not a regional or unusual hire.
That said, the “Public Affairs” framing on both titles is worth noting — these read less like operational sustainability roles (auditing factories, sourcing materials) and more like communications/government-relations roles managing SHEIN’s sustainability messaging and regulatory engagement.
That fits the broader pattern critics have pointed to: SHEIN has faced years of scrutiny over labor conditions, environmental impact, and (as in the earlier search) accusations of using acquisitions like Everlane to “greenwash” its image.
A Singapore-based Public Affairs/Sustainability team would likely be involved in managing exactly that kind of reputational and regulatory pressure — engaging with regulators, ESG disclosure requirements, and public narrative — rather than necessarily driving deep changes to manufacturing practices.
