Member Brief: Everlane and The Edge of Fashion DTC

In 1969, Donald Fisher opened a small store on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco that sold Levi’s denim alongside a curated rack of records. He called it The Gap, named for the generation he intended to dress. Forty-two years later, in 2011, Michael Preysman and Jesse Farmer launched Everlane from a small office in SoMa, four miles north of Fisher’s first storefront, and announced that the next Gap would be a digitally-native brand built on radical transparency. Today, Quince operates from a building somewhere between the two, having taken Shein’s quick-and-dirty production model and married it to Everlane’s faux-luxury positioning with ferocious commercial effect.