Michael Preysman, the founder and former CEO of Everlane, has announced the launch of a new fashion brand called ‘Still Radical’ — a pointed rejoinder to last month’s sale of his former company to Shein, the fast-fashion giant that has become a lightning rod for criticism over labor practices and environmental impact. The new venture, teased via interviews with Vogue and Puck this week, promises to return to the principles of radical transparency that defined Everlane’s early years but that Preysman believes were abandoned in the years following his departure from day-to-day operations in 2022.
Preysman’s framing of Still Radical is unmistakably personal. In conversations with journalists, he has described watching Everlane’s sale to Shein as a betrayal of the values he built the company around — ethical manufacturing, transparent pricing, and a direct-to-consumer model that forgoed traditional retail markups. The new brand, he says, will be a corrective: a return to the uncompromising product focus and supply chain honesty that made Everlane a phenomenon before its growth trajectory demanded compromises that Preysman was increasingly uncomfortable making. The name itself functions as both a promise and a taunt.
Perhaps the most intriguing detail to emerge from the early announcements is Preysman’s stated intention to keep Still Radical off social media. In an era when direct-to-consumer brands are virtually defined by their Instagram presence and TikTok virality, Preysman’s anti-platform strategy reads as a deliberate rejection of the marketing playbook he helped write. He has described the brand as “quiet and intimate,” suggesting a return to the word-of-mouth and email-based cultivation of community that characterized Everlane’s earliest days. Whether such an approach can scale in 2026’s attention economy remains an open question, but the strategic bet is clear: in a market saturated with influencer-driven noise, silence becomes a differentiator.
The product strategy, still under wraps, is described as being predicated on “accessible quality and craft” — a formulation that recalls Everlane’s original value proposition but promises a more rigorous execution. Preysman has hinted at a tightly edited offering of core wardrobe essentials — cashmere, denim, outerwear — produced in partnership with factories that meet exacting standards of labor and environmental practice. The pricing model, he has suggested, will return to the cost-plus transparency that Everlane pioneered: customers will see exactly what each garment costs to make and what the brand’s margin is.
The Still Radical announcement lands at a moment of intense scrutiny on the DTC fashion model that Preysman helped pioneer. Everlane’s sale to Shein was widely interpreted as a verdict on the limits of the direct-to-consumer approach: a brand that had raised hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars and defined a category ultimately sold for a fraction of its peak valuation to a company embodying everything it claimed to oppose. Preysman’s new venture is, in many ways, a test of whether the original thesis still holds — whether consumers will pay premium prices for transparency and quality when cheaper alternatives are a click away, or whether the DTC revolution was always going to end in the same consolidation and compromise that has swallowed every other retail disruption before it.
