Hali Borenstein: the insider taking Reformation public

As a teenager in Miami, Hali Borenstein would ride the bus to the mall whenever she had a free afternoon. "I'd walk up and down the mall for hours, just trying to look at every store, understand who was doing what and what was cool and how people were behaving," she recalled on Permira's Candid Conversations podcast. More than two decades later, the chief executive officer of the American sustainable fashion brand Reformation still works the floor — she tries on every garment before it ships — and that instinct for how clothes make people feel has carried her from merchandiser to the boss steering the company, founded in 2009, toward the public markets.

In June 2026, Permira-backed Reformation filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker 'REF'. It is the moment Borenstein has been building toward, carefully and on her own terms, since she stepped into the top job in the worst week of the company's life.

The labour question

Borenstein took the scenic route into retail. She earned a BA from Duke University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and began her career in consulting at Bain & Company "to really just learn how to solve problems," she told Time. A merchandising role at the children's clothing company Gymboree taught her the traditional apparel supply chain — and left her uneasy. Product kept arriving only to be marked down, and the constant conversation was how to push unit costs lower on what were, fundamentally, children's T-shirts.

"Am I valuing the work that goes into this product appropriately?" she remembered asking herself, on the Permira podcast. When Reformation's founder approached her, the brand's vertically integrated model — its own factory, its own values — felt like an answer. Tellingly, she insists it was not sustainability that first drew her: "The real reason I first came down from San Francisco and moved to Reformation was not just because of sustainability broadly. It was because of the labour piece," she said. The climate fluency came later. "It makes me feel like I can be both a great business leader but also an agent for change."

She joined in 2014 as director of merchandising, and her conviction deepened with motherhood. "My passion accelerated around 2017 as I became a parent," she told Los Angeles magazine.

A battlefield promotion

Borenstein's rise was steady — she was named president of the company in December 2017 — until June 2020, when it became sudden. Founder Yael Aflalo stepped down as CEO after former employees publicly alleged she had allowed a racist workplace culture to develop. The board elevated Borenstein to lead the company, confirming her as chief executive in 2020, a year after Permira had acquired a majority stake in 2019, with the founder and early backers retaining smaller holdings.

It was a debut nothing like the textbooks. "I took over in 2020 in the midst of a massive pandemic, a cultural upheaval," she said on the Permira podcast. "When you think about the case study in business schools, what it looks like when you step into a role like this — this was nothing like that." Her response was to listen before she led: "We went on the mass listening tour to really just hear the teams, hear what the business opportunities were, hear the feedback culturally, and then rewrite the values."

Eleven years inside the company are, she argues, her edge rather than a limit. "You need people who have been in an organisation for a long time," she said. "They really are that culture carrier. They understand the precedent, what's worked, what hasn't worked" — the institutional memory that lets a fast-growing brand move quickly without eroding what made it.

Profit as the price of a mission

Borenstein's central argument is that sustainability and profitability fund each other rather than fight. "When we set out to bring sustainable fashion to everyone, part of that was recognising we had to be profitable," she told Fortune at the National Retail Federation's Big Show in 2024. "We needed to build not only a sustainable business but a business that can fund itself and its expansion."

The discipline shows in what she has refused to do. In 2020, with the world in loungewear and Reformation's occasion dresses suddenly unwanted, the obvious move was a fast pivot to activewear. Her team found two paths: a conventional, better-than-average fabric available immediately, or a fully traceable fibre that set a new sustainability bar but cost 30 to 40% more and was six months away. They waited. "We made the decision to wait, use the more sustainable fibre," she said on the Permira podcast. "We certainly gave up a lot of revenue in the short term. But we're really proud that we put our mission first."

Underpinning the growth is a supply chain Borenstein treats as the real moat — its own Los Angeles factory can, she says, take a style "from sketch to market in 45 days". She tells the story of Jennifer Lopez wearing a Reformation linen dress on her honeymoon: a colourway that had been selling poorly "completely blew out" and went out of stock, so the team produced the fabric, cut and sewed it in-house, and, by her account, had it back online "in less than three weeks". "If your supply chain is 12 months out, you have to kind of be clairvoyant," she told Time.

The numbers, and the pressure

The Form S-1 filing, made on June 25, 2026, put hard figures behind the story. Reformation reported net revenue of 507.1 million dollars for the year to December 27, 2025, up from 438.2 million the year before, with first-quarter revenue up 30.4% year-on-year. It generates roughly 90% of sales through its own direct-to-consumer channels and operated about 70 stores at filing; per the prospectus, the company has posted positive net income every year since 2018, apart from a pandemic-hit 2020.

The picture is not a clean line upward, and the prospectus is honest about it. Full-year net profit fell to 12.6 million dollars from roughly 33 million the year before, and the most recent quarter's net loss widened — to 12.1 million dollars from 5.6 million a year earlier — as the company invested in stores and growth ahead of the listing. Borenstein frames the top line as durable: the business is "on track to continue to achieve record annual revenue targets," she told Time, even as tariffs and supply-chain disruption complicate the sustainability maths.

In the news

Borenstein is a visible but disciplined operator, named to the Time100 Next list in 2024 and a fixture on retail conference stages. Coverage has clustered around two themes: the long-rumoured IPO, on which she stayed studiously noncommittal — "there's nothing to report," she told Fortune in 2024, before the 2026 filing — and the brand's high-profile, occasionally risky collaborations.

The most pointed of those was a campaign with Monica Lewinsky. "Monica Lewinsky was a real risk. It could have gone a lot of ways," Borenstein told Time, defending it as consistent with the brand's values rather than buzz for its own sake. The founder-era allegations remain the most sensitive chapter in the company's history; Borenstein's tenure has been defined by moving past it.

The mother in the room

Much of her drive, she says, is domestic. Borenstein lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two daughters. "I'm a mother, and I want to feel good about what I do," she told Los Angeles magazine. "I like to run a successful business that makes money and is profitable, but I also care a lot about the world. Reformation is a place that enables me to do both." Her proudest moment, she says, was not a sales record but the spring of 2020, when the company turned its sewing talent toward making what she says were more than 300,000 masks for Los Angeles during the pandemic's first weeks.

For all the metrics she can recite, the lesson Borenstein returns to is about risk — the thing she wishes she had taken more of, and the thing an IPO now demands. "Be OK with failing, you will get back on track," she said on the Permira podcast, reflecting on the advice she would give her younger self. "I was so focused on numbers and being the best at what I could do that I forgot to fall down more." As Reformation steps onto the public stage, the insider who tries on every dress is betting that the brand she helped build can do what she once couldn't: take the bigger risk, and stay itself.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.