Veronica Chou was born into the garment industry, and now the 35-year-old founder, investor and mom of 4-year-old twin boys is applying a lifetime of knowledge to a passion project that brings many of fashion’s biggest buzzwords—sustainability and size inclusion among them—to life in one forward-thinking brand that strives to rewrite the script for what women’s apparel can be.
Everybody & Everyone debuted on Monday with 23 products spanning recycled socks (up to $38 for a set of three) and T-shirts ($48) to denim ($138), sweatshirts ($138) and two-in-one puffer jackets ($288).
But unlike incumbent fashion brands struggling to pivot their sprawling supply chains to ethical factories and eco-friendly fabrics, Chou’s direct-to-consumer brand is built from the ground up with sustainable sourcing and environmental considerations baked in.
Chou has also parlayed her fashion industry background into connections with many of the most interesting and innovative industry startups around.
The daughter of Silas Chou—the Hong Kong billionaire who has had financial dealings with iconic brands like Karl Lagerfeld, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, and Pepe Jeans—she has followed in her father’s investment footsteps by taking stakes in and learning from companies ranging from direct-to-consumer plus-size fashion newcomer Eloquii and mushroom “leather” maker Modern Meadow to thetot.com, which curates “safe” baby products, like organic onesies and non-toxic toys.
Chou is admittedly “really into material science,” and nowhere is that more evident than when she’s talking about the fabrics that make up E&E’s inaugural collection—and how many of them will quickly evolve with an eye to sustainability and circularity.
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One T-shirt style that incorporates a blend of recycled cotton and recycled polyester will be replaced with a recycled cotton/virgin cotton fabric for the next season. The goal, Chou says, is to eliminate mixed materials as much as possible until recycling technologies can handle the blended fibers at scale.
T-shirts today are produced by Tintex in Porto, Portugal, the city where Chou’s father cut his teeth in the industry decades ago, which she calls “really meaningful.” Eventually, the brand wants to shift some of this production to a facility in Georgia, says Chou, who wants to reshore as much as possible, even while conceding the limitations of America’s apparel manufacturing talent pool.
Dresses, for one, can’t be cut and sewn in the U.S. with the same production volume and technical fit and accuracy as you’d find at a Chinese factory, she explained.
“The truth is there are some things we can’t make in America yet,” Chou said, acknowledging that President Trump’s pro-America push to revive domestic manufacturing is a win for sustainability “because we’re not shipping things around.”
But the quality and workmanship, not to mention capacity, at many U.S. factories isn’t quite where it needs to be, she added.
Designing from a sustainability-first perspective forced E&E to make some tough decisions. When Chou wanted to find a clone of the fabric in a blazer she owned, the only comparable material contained virgin plastic, which is where she draws the line. Instead, E&E eventually found a different option and “had to design into it,” she said.
Jeans by E&E offer a similarly thoughtful approach to design. Chou said the startup co-developed a special hemp/cotton denim blend with Italian mill Candiani, and manufactured the initial batch of bottoms at a sustainable factory in El Paso, Texas, though production will switch to a Los Angeles factory for future denim releases. Many of the brand’s mill and factory partners are located in proximity to reduce needless shipping, Chou explained.
The brand’s silk button-down blouses are produced by the Profit Fund Global Holdings Co. in China, which grows its own mulberry trees to feed organic silk-producing worms. Profits Fund, a “good partner,” according to Chou, has been willing to split the higher costs brought on by Trump’s tariffs at an even 50/50, said Chou, who adds that like other brands with a supply chain in China, she’s “a little bit concerned” about the uncertainty around these duties that are subject to change at a tweet’s notice.
Other suppliers, manufacturers and partners on E&E’s roster read like a who’s who in responsible production: Naadam, the cashmere disrupter; Spain’s recycled plastic guru Ecoalf; Mozartex in China, which specializes in working with Tencel lyocell; and ITC, and an accessories maker with offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Shanghai and Hong Kong that makes socks for the startup.
Much as she’s concerned with designing for circularity, Chou has her sights set on adding a resale and upcycling component to the E&E website further down the line. For now, the brand has partnered with fashion recycling giant I:CO to find a new purpose for end-of-life garments that customers no longer want.
Chou extends that sustainable and circular thinking to virtually every aspect of E&Es operations. The brand persuaded its freight forwarder, Mainfreight, to plant trees to reduce carbon emissions, and partnered with 3Degrees to offset all of its pre-launch activities. At checkout, customers can choose to donate to One Tree Planted, which plants a tree for the cost of $1 for each E&D package dispatched. 3D design software by CLO helps the brand iterate on product development without cutting as many samples as it would otherwise.
Though Chou described embracing size inclusivity as a “no brainer,” actually designing for plus-size figures was more challenging than she realized. Aside from having to bring in two different fit models and create two sets of patterns, “grading changes a lot” when sizes cross over from straight into the plus threshold.
Following the sizing standard that treats two numbers as one size—0/00, 2/4, 6/8, and so on—E&E breaks 14 and 16 into standalone sizes, much as Good American created a special size 15 to straddle the dead zone where fit and sizing tend to break from the conventions of straight or plus sizing.
The grading chart makes such a leap in this range, Chou explained, that women “in the middle can’t find the right size.”
Developing products for a broad spectrum of sizes means making seemingly small tweaks to ensure a consistent fit. A camisole planned for spring and designed with thin straps will have the plus version include wider straps for proper support, for example.
E&E’s website showcases 10 different models, including Chou herself, highlighting how the clothes look in varying sizes so women don’t have to purchase on a wing and a prayer. But Chou frets that even nearly a dozen model morphologies isn’t inclusive enough. She’s already thinking about finding age-inclusive models for upcoming collections.
As a special advisor to the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, Chou made sure E&E associated with eco-conscious industry syndicates from the get-go to guide its sustainability journey. A member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and Textile Exchange, the G7 Fashion Pact signatory is also a member of The Microfibre Consortium, which is working to stem the release of harmful micro- and nano-fibers and plastics, byproducts of textile production and the product life cycle, into waterways.
And like any good DTC brand, E&E has ambitions to place data at the heart of decision-making.
“My dream is data will tell me if we need to design a white shirt or a red shirt,” Chou said, noting that the consumer direct model allows the brand to collect and quickly integrate customer insights in a tighter feedback loop.
“Creativity has to be there,” she added, but it’s important to test the market to see what people want to purchase.
As fashion brands struggle to make sustainability central to their operations, Chou believes adopting eco-first models will help streamline purchasing decisions for shoppers—and normalize green business for good.
“Businesses should have the responsibility to do it right,” she said, “so that consumers don’t have to worry and can just buy and consume what they want.”