Reformation are filing for IPO. One of the DTC brands who have been getting things right. Around since 2013, maybe their maturity places them well to make better decisions. History tells us a different story for the brands who make this jump. and current category analysis suggests this could be really tought. Gymshark just bought back its outside investment. Read that again slowly. A brand that could have chased the public markets decided the price of that particular ticket was too high and walked away. I expect them to pull back significantly in the US as a result, and I think that is the right call. Not every brand needs to be everywhere. Some brands need to stay themselves. Not today or tomorrow but a rethink is afoot IMO.
Reformation is going the other way. A billion-dollar NYSE listing, twenty consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, a sustainability positioning that is genuinely built into the product rather than printed on a swing tag. It is an impressive business. I have written about them before on Substack. Their stores are brilliant and loved by many But the IPO is not just a financing event. Is it the right move? Is it now? Can they buck the trend? .
Harrys
Casper
Bonobos
Away
Modcloth
Indochino
History, which has very little interest in being original, has some views on how this tends to go. Shein just reported a sharp pull back, supply chains are still figuring themselves out. What next for refomration after this move.
Dame Shirley Bassey had it right. It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
So rather than predict what Reformation will do, I want to share some signals to watch for in the months and years ahead. Each brand that has been through this before left clues on the way down. Different clues, different failure modes. These are what I see as common threads to pull in the unravelling - pressures are different and decicion processes changed.
The first gauge is the product pipeline. Category expansion is always seen as a value addbut if there are DTC clothing brands becomign AI platforms, it is usually a sign all is not well. . Allbirds launched with a genuinely odd idea, a running shoe made from merino wool, and the strangeness was the point. Then they IPOed in 2021 into a valuation that assumed the weirdness was infinitely scalable. It is not. They expanded into cateogries they should not and this expansion, whilst it worked early doors added a new dimension and meant they were now in fast fashion - a non core brand principle and added consumer pressure - even if you don’t see it. Substitutions available everywhere.
Scaling weird requires protecting the people who make the weird decisions, and public markets are structurally allergic to those people because their reasoning does not fit in a slide deck. Allbirds spent the years after their IPO trying to be a normal shoe brand. The market punished them for that too, but by then the original thing was gone. When Reformation’s product stops taking risks, when the drops start feeling considered rather than pointed, that is the first breadcrumb on the path.
The second gauge is the copy. Innocent Drinks built an entire business on a voice. Cheeky, warm, slightly daft, and entirely consistent from the bottle label to the press release. Coca-Cola bought in gradually from 2009, and the process was not sudden. It was incremental. A little more caution here, a little less edge there, a committee on the subject of whether this particular joke was appropriate for all markets. By the time Coke had full control, the voice on the bottle was a costume. The soul had left a long time before anyone official announced it. Reformation’s “being naked is the number one most sustainable option” line is doing real work. It is funny and it is true and it is the kind of thing a founder approves in thirty seconds and a comms committee argues about for a fortnight. Watch how long that energy survives the first earnings call.
The third gauge is distribution. Warby Parker is the clearest case here. They pioneered the home try-on, opened stores that felt like galleries rather than opticians, and built a genuine alternative to the Luxottica duopoly. Then they IPOed and store count became the strategy. The number of locations started appearing in investor materials as evidence of growth rather than as a consequence of demand. When the store rollout is the headline rather than what happens inside the stores, the tail is wagging the dog. Reformation has physical retail and it is good retail, specific and considered. The question is whether the pressure to show revenue growth will turn considered retail into aggressive retail. Those are very different things.
The fourth gauge is the people, not just the C-suite announcements but the mid-level operators who built the thing. I want to be careful here because I got this wrong in an earlier draft. I had the wrong person at the wrong brand, Liam Shannon built something significant but it was at Represent, not Reformation. The point stands though, and it is more general than any one name. The people who carry a brand’s instincts are rarely the ones whose departures make the press release. They are the buyers, the creative directors, the social leads, the people who know what the brand would never do. When they leave in clusters, something has already been decided internally that has not been announced externally. Watch the LinkedIn updates of the people you have never heard of.
The fifth gauge, and this one is specific to sustainable fashion, is the certifications and the claims. The category is now crowded enough that Lululemon is the ceiling everyone is headbutting, and the space between premium and commoditised is narrowing. When brands in this position come under earnings pressure, the temptation is to reach for marketing claims that sound like values without costing what values actually cost. Reformation’s sustainability credentials are more structural than most. But the public markets have a way of making the cost of doing the right thing feel optional in a way that the cost of quarterly numbers never does.
None of these gauges are in the red right now. Reformation is in a genuinely strong position and the IPO reflects real performance, not narrative inflation. But the instrument panel is now assembled. The breadcrumbs are on the path. Check back in four quarters and let’s see which way the trail goes.