Founder · Operator · Circular Economy
Nick
Nick
Benavides
He helped build an app that disrupted Wall Street. Now he shreds old cotton and spins it back into shirts - no water, no dye, no apology.
He helped build an app that disrupted Wall Street. Now he shreds old cotton and spins it back into shirts - no water, no dye, no apology.
There is a QR code stitched into the seam of an Everywhere garment. Scan it and the shirt tells you how to send it back so it can become another shirt. That small square is the whole philosophy of Nick Benavides in miniature - a man who decided the most radical thing you can do with a T-shirt is refuse to let it die.
Benavides is the cofounder and CEO of Everywhere Apparel, a Los Angeles materials-science company that manufactures blank apparel from 100% recycled cotton. Not "partly recycled." Not "recycled-ish." The fiber comes from cotton garments and scraps that get mechanically shredded and re-spun into new yarn - a process the company calls CirCot, run without water, without dyes, without the synthetic blends that shed microplastics into the wash.
It is an unglamorous product in service of an enormous idea: that the clothing industry, one of the planet's thirstiest and most wasteful, can be made to run in a circle instead of a straight line to the landfill. Benavides likes to frame the blank tee as a beachhead. Win the most boring garment in fashion, and you have a template for everything else.
We want to change the whole world.
The resume reads like a non-sequitur. Stanford, class of 2008, a degree in religious studies earned on scholarship. Then Bain & Company, the consultant's apprenticeship. Then, in 2011, Benavides joined two college friends to start a small fintech outfit registered as Chronos Research. You know it by the name it took later: Robinhood, the app that made stock trading free and made a lot of brokerages very nervous. He served as COO through 2015.
Most people would have stayed in finance. Benavides went looking for a harder problem. He and his cofounders had been running an indie record label, and they kept hitting the same wall: there was no band merch they could feel good about. Everything either looked great and trashed the planet, or claimed to be sustainable and was thin on proof.
So they did the founder thing. They built the supply chain themselves.
Frustrated by the lack of genuinely sustainable band merchandise for their own record label, Benavides and his co-founders launched Everywhere in 2019 to fix the problem at the source - the fiber.
Three Stanford grads: Nick Benavides (CEO), Maxwell Citron (CTO, a self-described "nutty inventor"), and Irys Kornbluth (COO, a former competitive classical pianist).
Cotton garments and fabric scraps - including excess merch, like the 15-plus pallets of leftover Paramore tour goods - get gathered instead of dumped.
A mechanical process breaks the cotton down and re-spins it into durable yarn. No water in fiber production. No dyes, bleaches or chemicals.
Yarn becomes GRS-certified blanks, knit and sewn in Los Angeles. A QR code lets the wearer send it back to start the loop again.
We want to be the supplier of choice for fashion companies, events and designers looking for apparel with low environmental impact and a closed loop story.
There is a huge appetite for sustainable clothing right now, with buyers struggling to find options that are in stock and reasonably priced.
Benavides treats the recycled blank as the easy part. The real wager is that closed-loop manufacturing can match virgin materials on price, quality and availability - and that once it does, there is no reason to stop at clothing. Everywhere's founders describe apparel as "an obvious beachhead market" for the circular economy, with a vision that runs well past the humble tee.
That is the through-line from the Robinhood years, if you squint. Both bets start with the same instinct: take something everyone treats as fixed - brokerage fees, the linear life of a garment - and ask why it has to be that way. One answer made trading free. The other is trying to make waste optional.