sustainable-apparel
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Make the forest worth keeping.
Wildlife Works began with a sewing machine and a conservation problem. Its answer became a carbon business whose hardest work happens far from the carbon ledger.
Dave Spandorfer Built Janji for the Long Run
A hot 10K, a borrowed business education and years spent fixing the product turned a student idea into Janji. Now its co-founder is testing what a mission-led running brand can promise next.
The Ski Shop That Deleted Its Own Stores and Won
In 1984 it was a rental counter on St. Denis Street. By 2016 the last store was gone and the whole company lived online. Here is how two employees bought the place and turned closing stores into the plan.
Drew Eakins
Drew Eakins is a marketing leader in the outdoor industry and the marketing chief for Reima's North America business, the 80-year-old Finnish children's outdoor clothing and footwear brand. Based in Colorado, he has spent more than a decade building outdoor brands, with earlier stops at Cotopaxi, Hestra Gloves, and Great Trango Holdings. He is known for connecting technical outdoor products with the audiences who actually use them, and for leaning into brand storytelling, wholesale partnerships, and channel strategy.
Harriet Lee
Harriet Lee is a New York-based marketing leader at ONDO, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand known for its no-slip, no-show socks made from Woolmark-certified Australian merino wool and organic cotton. She describes her work as 'data-driven brand innovation,' pairing a creative fashion background from 3.1 Phillip Lim with the analytics-first playbook of a Shopify-native e-commerce brand. She helps ONDO turn a mundane product - socks - into a category built on a no-slip guarantee, sustainability, and a loyal 20,000-plus five-star review community.
Mad Engine Global, LLC
Mad Engine Global is a Glendale, California-based designer, manufacturer and distributor of licensed, branded and private-label apparel and accessories. Founded in 1987 as a small Southern California t-shirt supplier, it has grown into a vertically integrated, omnichannel consumer-products company that turns pop-culture properties - from Disney and Marvel to Fortnite, Netflix and Coca-Cola - into wearable merchandise for mass retail, specialty and e-commerce channels worldwide. It also owns brands including LRG, Neff Headwear, Mighty Fine and Fifth Sun, and runs a Take Back recycling program as part of its sustainability push.
ONDO
ONDO is a New York-based direct-to-consumer apparel brand that reinvented the no-show sock. Founded by former JP Morgan banker Daniel Shim in 2020, ONDO uses a patented, cut-and-sewn silicone grip strip - rather than the usual rubber dots - to keep low-cut socks from slipping off. Built on Woolmark-certified Australian merino wool and certified organic cotton, the brand backs every pair with a No Slip Guarantee and has grown to more than 20,000 five-star reviews while expanding into headbands, compression crew socks, and other everyday essentials.
Reima
Reima is a Finnish children's outdoor clothing company founded in 1944 that designs functional, weatherproof apparel, footwear and accessories for kids aged 0-12. Built on a mission to get every child active outdoors for at least an hour a day, Reima pairs Nordic design with technical performance - waterproof jackets, snowsuits, softshells, base layers and shoes - and has become an industry leader in sustainable, circular kidswear, cutting its emissions more than 50% since 2021 and selling in roughly 50 countries.
Vuori
Vuori is a Carlsbad, California-based performance apparel company that blends athletic function with casual style. Founded in 2015 by Joe Kudla, it started as a direct-to-consumer men's activewear brand rooted in the coastal Southern California lifestyle and grew into a broad athleisure label for men and women. Known for soft technical fabrics like its DreamKnit and Ponto lines, Vuori sells online, through its own stores, and via wholesale partners including Nordstrom, REI and Equinox. A 2024 secondary investment led by General Atlantic and Stripes valued the company at $5.5 billion.
Everywhere Apparel
Everywhere Apparel is a Los Angeles-based materials science company that turns textile waste into 100% recycled cotton clothing through its proprietary, GRS-certified CirCot fiber system. Founded in 2019 by three Stanford graduates, it sells blank and custom apparel to brands, bands, screen printers and uniform programs, and closes the loop with a free QR-code take-back program that recycles worn garments back into new products.
Shilpa Shah
Shilpa Shah is the co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of Cuyana, the San Francisco-based sustainable luxury fashion brand built around two words: fewer, better. A UC Berkeley-trained UX designer who spent a decade building interfaces for Disney, AT&T, and Sun Microsystems before pivoting to business school at 32 — pregnant during her first semester — Shah co-founded Cuyana in 2011 with Karla Gallardo. The company has grown into a cult-favorite direct-to-consumer brand with 7 retail locations, 150+ employees, celebrity fans including Jessica Alba and Ayesha Curry, and $30 million in Series C funding from H.I.G. Capital. At Cuyana, Shah is the architect of the customer experience, championing quality over quantity in an industry obsessed with the opposite.