In a saturated market, branding is the key to turning a profit. And in 2010, the founders of the clothing company Everlane hit on a brand strategy that positioned them well in the competitive field of online fashion: they promised to be honest and good. The notion, dubbed “radical transparency,” rhymed with the firm’s apparel concept which foregrounded tasteful basics. Everything about Everlane was accessible, simple, and clean.

In the beginning, Everlane seemed like the anti–American Apparel, which had been in a tailspin for years. At the same time venture capitalists were coughing up seed money for Everlane, the federal government was investigating American Apparel for misleading shareholders. In the preceding years, its founder Dov Charney had gained a reputation as a serial sexual harasser, casting the company’s distinctive advertising style featuring amateur models in provocative poses in a sinister light. And as anyone who frequented American Apparel’s white-walled brick-and-mortar stores in the late aughts remembers, the quality of the clothing was rapidly declining.

In the hailstorm of controversy, American Apparel’s origins were all but forgotten. In reality, they were not dissimilar from Everlane’s. American Apparel, too, was founded as a supposedly ethical clothing company specializing in simple essentials. The brand relied heavily on the promise that its clothes were sweatshop-free, its workers paid a fair wage in the United States. To the modern urban older-millennial consumer, Charney told the New York Times in 2004 as the brand was beginning to explode, “it doesn’t feel good when their happiness is based on exploitation.”