Everlane seems to represent the paradox of a profit-driven company that wants to do capitalism the "right" way, refusing to get away with the sneaky profit-optimizing strategies that other companies depend on, and exposing its own labor practices and costs so that consumers can make informed decisions. The factory profiles on the brand's site repeatedly point to the company's practice of only working with facilities that treat their workers with integrity, and, according to Preysman, Everlane is currently developing its own internal set of factory auditing standards, which he hopes will go into effect next year. "I think what makes us ethical," Preysman says before pausing. "It's not necessarily ethical, but it's brutally honest. We're brutally honest internally, and we're brutally honest with the customer."

But if gestures like the Black Friday Fund are authentically anti-greed, they're also possibly profit-friendly. American Apparel has long used its labor practices as a branding tool ("Made in the USA," "Sweat Shop Free"), and smaller boutique companies—like indie men's basics label Fanmail and online designer retailer Honest By— have built compelling identities with their emphasis on fair labor practices and pricing transparency. "We like feeling connected to the objects we wear and surround ourselves with," explains Charlie Morris, Fanmail's founder and creative director. "For some, Fanmail's materials and practices align with their personal values. For others, it's an interesting story. Either way, it creates a connection with the customer and has absolutely helped to differentiate the brand. When you put a window into your process for your customer to see, it tends to bring about more considered choices."

Larger businesses now see transparency as a useful strategy, too. A trade organization called the Sustainable Apparel Coalition—which includes companies like Nike, Walmart, and Gap—is currently developing something called the Higg index, described on the group's website as "a suite of assessment tools that standardizes the measurement of the environmental and social impacts of apparel and footwear products across the product life cycle and throughout the value chain." According to a recent report by Stephanie Clifford in The New York Times, this is likely a response to a shift occurring within the retailers' target demographics: last year, a study at MIT and Harvard revealed that "some consumers—even those who were focused on discount prices—were not only willing to pay more, but actually did pay more, for clothes that carried signs about fair-labor practices."

Everlane is a brand built upon an awareness of a new kind of consumer—the kind of person who cares where her coffee and chickens come from, and also her clothes. "Right now, the Everlane customer is somebody who's urban, educated, and is a conscious consumer," says Preysman. "They pay attention to where things come from, how long they'll last. I think it's [about] confidence and being smart. When people buy Everlane, they feel smart for having bought it. They know who they are and what they stand for. "It may be true that the people who buy Everlane clothes are smarter for doing so—who wants to pay $325 dollars for a classic beige trench coat, when at Everlane they can pay only $138? Still, the way we dress tends to be much more personal and psychological a matter than a mere question of wanting to make sound ethical and economic choices. A company interested in "radical transparency" could easily make clothes that looked very different from Everlane's, and to judge from some conversations I had with a few loyal Everlane customers, it's the combined look, feel, and affordability of the clothes—more than any professed "do-gooder" intentions—that keeps people coming back.