I’m an Everlane fan, customer, and unpaid product evangelist.

For Black Friday, they chose not to engage in the madness that is American consumerism:

— BUY LESS, BUY BETTER —

As a business, we appreciate holiday shopping,
but we feel the excess around Black Friday has put
the focus on quantity over quality.

Because we want to help people consume
less by creating fewer, longer lasting products,
we decided to shut down the site today.

Have a wonderful holiday and
we’ll be back tomorrow.

That takes balls. But this message sends a very clear signal to the kind of customers that Everlane is looking to attract.

Among the comments when I posted this on Facebook:

I have been getting their emails for a while but haven’t purchased anything yet. Extra tempted now.

I’ll be buying from them tomorrow 🙂

That is SO cool, and I had never heard of that company. Because of your post, I’m now looking forward to finding out more, tomorrow.

And lots more discussion on Twitter.

To the company that makes 80% of their revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years (not uncommon in retail), this move probably looks like suicide.

But to the company that stands for something and that’s willing to draw a line in the sand, this is a (brilliant) no-brainer that will pay dividends for many weeks and months to come.