When Yael Aflalo went looking for someone to build out Reformation’s stores, she found Hali Borenstein on LinkedIn. Borenstein was a former Bain & Company consultant with no fashion pedigree, and the company she joined in 2014 had exactly three stores. She paused the rollout almost immediately. “Our team only had time to find you a size or check you out, never to have a conversation,” Borenstein told WWD last year, explaining why she stopped opening stores to build the technology underneath them first. A decade later, she is the chief executive who has filed to take the whole thing public.
Reformation submitted its registration statement yesterday, and intends to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker REF, with J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and RBC Capital Markets running the offering. The figures it carries to investors describe the company Borenstein built: net revenue of $507.1 million for 2025 and a 30.4 percent jump to $112.3 million in the first quarter of 2026. That makes 20 straight quarters of double-digit growth, almost all of it earned through Reformation’s own stores and website rather than wholesale. The company counted 1.1 million active direct-to-consumer customers at the end of March, spending an average of $421 each over the quarter — repeat-buyer economics that has made the brand attractive enough to bring to market in the first place.
It is also the exit Permira has waited six years for. The firm took a majority stake in 2019, when the label was estimated to be doing about $150 million in sales, and a public listing is the return a buyout fund eventually comes to collect. “I’ve been fortunate to have an incredible partner,” Borenstein said of Permira’s support. “They will need to have a return. And so if I don’t get ahead of going to figure out all the options, I’m going to not love what my outcome is for our team,” she said. She did not always speak this way. As recently as 2024 she brushed off the same speculation, telling WWD that “buzz is buzz, but that was never substantiated” and that the company was “just building a great company.”
Can Reformation sell sustainability and a share price at once?
The filing exposes what running on principle costs once the costs climb. Revenue grew, but net profit fell to $12.6 million from $33 million the year before, and gross margin contracted 360 basis points to 60.2 percent under tariffs imposed through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. A direct-to-consumer model carries the full weight of shipping, returns, and store operations, and that weight often presses hardest when a company needs to show a widening margin. Reformation’s identity has always pulled the other way. It scores the carbon and water footprint of every garment through its RefScale tool and has committed to becoming circular by 2030 after reaching for a climate-positive target in 2025.
Its leverage has been cultural more than financial. The 2024 campaign built around Monica Lewinsky generated more than $2 million in media value within 48 hours. “The work that she’s done to really get her voice out there and to make a difference, especially with online behavior, is really unique,” Borenstein said when it ran.
The growth Borenstein is selling leans on the stores she once froze. “People hated retail stores for years and now everyone’s dying for a retail store,” she said, describing how fast the channel turned back in its favor. Reformation now operates 70 stores, with denim, shoes, and a relaunched swim line widening the assortment, and a European push she considers a more natural home than the United States. “Objectively, European customers are louder and more committed to sustainability than Americans,” she said.
Reformation is making the move against an industry drifting the other way. In May, Everlane, another millennial darling that sold shoppers a transparent path to net-zero, was acquired by Shein from its majority owner, a pairing its own customers mourned online. Ralph Lauren dropped its net-zero target this year, and roughly two-thirds of major brands are behind the 2030 emissions goals they set for themselves.
Borenstein is asking public investors to fund the opposite bet.
The consultant who once arrived to oversee three stores now frames the company as something an order of magnitude larger, and the case she is making to public investors is the one she has been making all along. “I believe this is a multibillion-dollar opportunity. The last five years was proof points of, ‘Can we do it?’” she said. “We’re going to continue our mission, which is making great product, delivering great financial outcomes and environmental ones at the same time.”
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