I was asked to share more about my experience with Everlane, and I’m happy to, though it’s probably going to be a long one. I’ve been shopping with them since 2014 and have only ever ordered online, so I’ve had more than a decade to see how they operate. For about six or seven years, almost my entire closet was Everlane and I was buying several pieces a month. These days the designs don’t interest me as much, and over the last six months they’ve really slowed down on new styles. It also feels like they’re making clothes for a very short, very young customer that doesn’t include me, though that part is obviously subjective. The bigger issue for me is how much their shipping and fulfillment has fallen apart. About a year or maybe two ago, I noticed a clear shift and assumed they had switched shippers. I had also seen them doing more and more to squeeze extra money out of customers, like raising the free-shipping minimum and adding package protection, while prices kept climbing, so I figured the shipping change was probably about cutting costs. At first the new shipper was mostly fine, but the tracking often wasn’t updated, which made it hard to know where anything stood. I even reached out about that, and Everlane told me they care more about speed than scanning items properly, so sometimes packages don’t get scanned as they move through the system. That explanation was pretty astonishing to me and honestly sounded made up on the spot, but I let it go. Things were still moving, more or less, and I assumed that was just the new normal. Then a few weeks ago I ordered some T-shirts and ran into the same bad tracking again. Their website says delivery should take 4 to 7 business days, but after two weeks the order still hadn’t arrived, so I contacted customer service. The scans were clearly wrong, with the same update showing up for days and no real sign of movement. At that point they refunded the order at my request. A week later the package finally showed up anyway, even though the tracking never updated and there was no way to know that was coming, so I reached out again and sent it back. After that, I decided to give them one more try and placed another order. A week passed with no visible movement toward fulfillment, and in earlier years if they had a backlog they would at least tell customers they were behind but still working through the queue. When I contacted customer service this time, I was told they had high volume and were working on it, which didn’t seem believable at all. From the interactions I’ve had, it really feels like they have no idea what’s happening, and the responses come across as a brush-off rather than an actual explanation. It seems like they no longer care or know how to fix their process. I don’t see the point of tracking if it isn’t accurate or current, and I honestly wonder if they even realize how much trouble their fulfillment partner is in. Since Everlane supposedly does small batches, when shipping and fulfillment break down like this, the item is often gone by the time you might reorder it. That’s incredibly frustrating. At this point I’d only order from Everlane if I didn’t mind waiting a very long time or didn’t really care whether the item ever arrived. That’s a huge change from what I experienced for so many years, and the whole team now seems to treat it like nothing is wrong. I’m not sure what happened or whether they even understand the problem, but it’s very strange and very different from the other companies I shop with, like Madewell, Sezane, Anthropologie, Nordstrom, J.Crew, Frank & Eileen, and Beek, where glitches may happen but things usually get sorted out. Walking away after 12 years feels odd, but this level of aggravation is not something I want adding to my day.
