During one of my insomnia bouts, I was scrolling through social media (as we tend to do) and I came across an ad featuring a couple shirts that caught my eye. In my sleepy hazy excitement, I added one to my cart and was ready to buy, but came to my senses. Who (or what) is Aelfric Eden?
I had never head of the Aelfric Eden brand before — and the name was unpronounceable to me — so I was immediately extra skeptical. I asked myself all the questions one would in today’s shady internet world: Was Aelfric Eden a scam? Did they designed the clothing themselves? How is the quality? And are their clothes ethically produced (or are they dropshipping them from Ali Express)?
We went down the rabbit hole and have done our best to delve into the company’s founders, history and background so we can better assess its legitimacy and ethical practices, and explore claims of originality. We scoured some credible online sources to see if we can answer a couple of these questions.
Who founded Aelfric Eden?
When it comes to a internet brand you’re unfamiliar with, it’s good to know how the company came to be. What is an Aelfric Eden anyways? My initial assumption is that the brand is based off the founder’s unique name, but we can’t find anyone with that speciic first and last name. There’s no person with that name on LinkedIn and even more curiously, Aelfric Eden has no LinkedIn company page either?
So we dug. We couldn’t find any worthwhile bio info on their instagram. We eventually came across the company’s UK site and they refer to the founder’s name as Eden and then reference “our two brand founders.” Who those founders are, and specifically their names, is unknown as of this posting. And in this age when there’s no tracks it’s purposeful that those tracks are covered. We put that in our “suspicious” bucket — why they’re being suspicious is yet to be seen, but if you got nothing to hide…
We dug even more and came across this trademark website Justia. According to Justia, the trademark for the company’s name belongs to a Zhu Meihua.
That’s certainly not Aelfric or Eden. Perhaps it’s their English name? As you can see, in that same trademark filing, the wording ‘”Aelfric Eden” has no meaning in a foreign language.’ Thats about as detailed as we could find. No specific information regarding the identities and background of the founder(s) are very limited.
Where was Aelfric Eden Founded?
There isn’t just questions about whom founded the company, but also inconsistencies about where the company was founded. According to the company’s U.S. About page, Aelfric Eden was founded in 2014 by an Asian-American in Los Angeles California, but on a couple of Aelfric Eden’s own product pages, the company says that it was founded in Hon Kong.
Here’s a cached version if that page no longer works.
So it’s Los Angeles and Hong Kong. That sets off multiple alerts already, but it doesn’t end there. Going back to Aelfric Eden’s United Kingdom site, the About page says the company was founded in San Marino, California. While this is a residential city in Los Angeles county and not technically incorrect, it’s more conflicting information for one simple question.
It’s certainly worth paying attention to how the brand represents itself and how it chooses to represent themselves. This is especially true if you’re concerned with the legitimacy and ethical business practices influence where you spend your money.
Despite conflicting information, the prevailing belief is that the company originated outside of the United States. Several reviews of the company indicate that the vast majority of their products are primarily manufactured and shipped from China. This is somewhat confirmed by the company’s mission statement on the UK site:
In order to bring our best quality and price street clothing to our customers, we have our own factories and workers in Asia now.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a company selling clothing in the United States and shipping it from China, Our problem is that Aelfric Eden isn’t upfront about it all.
They want us to assume that because the company was supposedly founded and created in Los Angeles (or San Marino) that the clothes may be coming from California — or at least a warehouse based in LA county, but that doesn’t seem to be true.
And another issue we have with the company is that none of the models are Asian — they continue pushing this all-American skater brand, but it’s apparently without Asians? That’s certainy not true in Los Angeles where they purportedly were founded.
“Los Angelss county has, by far, the largest Asian population of any county in the United States” according to the LA Almanac. This is epecially problematic since all signals tells us that this was founded by Asians from somewhere in Asia.
As to who created Aelfric Eden? It’s not easy to determine or discern with any amount of certainty. To me that makes me very apprehensive about supporting a company that is so opaque about their founders with conflicting information about where company was founded.