The Enshittification of eShakti

The dress was an absolute stunner. Its floor-length skirt featured copious folds of cotton poplin patterned with white, navy, and kelly green chevrons. The sleeveless bodice hit me right at the waist, and a notch in the neckline gave just the right amount of flirt. And, of course, like all perfect dresses, it had pockets. 

The pockets were the headline. Everywhere I wore it—and I wore it a lot in the 2010s—I became a walking “Thanks, it has pockets!” meme. But the subhed was important, too. The dress was from eShakti, an India-based clothing manufacturer once beloved by shoppers—especially plus-size women like myself—who appreciated the company’s signature offering: made-to-measure garments at a reasonable price. Sure, I often had to wait a few weeks to receive my orders, but it sure beat getting drenched in sweat and despair in a mall-store fitting room, assuming mall stores even carried my size in the trendy, fashion-forward clothes I preferred. 

For a decade or so between 2012 and 2022, I was as much an eShakti evangelist as I was a “pockets” meme, and I felt even better about it thanks to the company advertising its commitment to “the health, well-being, and ethical treatment of all our employees worldwide.” eShakti was a unicorn in the fast-fashion forest. Their offerings were both on-trend and classic, and great for workwear, vacations, and even bridal styles. Before my wedding, I bought a cream-colored 50s-style cocktail dress to serve as my backup gown, because I am both curvy and mercurial: I wanted options for my look on that day, the big day. And eShakti literally delivered.

I am now writing about eShakti in the past tense not because the company flamed out in a spectacular going-out-of-business sale, or was subsumed in another fashion industry buyout, but because they seem to have just … stopped? … after a prolonged but mysterious decline. The first clear indication that something was up at eShakti surfaced in early 2023 with the beginnings of an online whisper network—though some of it involved all-CAPS ranting—among shoppers warning of delayed and unfulfilled orders.

Today, eShakti remains deceptively live; users can fill their carts with clothing and accessories only to be told “We are currently unable to process your payment due to technical issuess,” typo and all, at the final step. It’s a frustrating and cruel tease, especially in light of the untold numbers of eShakti shoppers who are still waiting on orders placed before the check-out function was disabled.

If I may invoke yet another meme, this time the Confused Anime Guy with Butterfly: Is this an enshittification? The term, coined in 2023 by writer and Very Online dude Cory Doctorow, originally referred to the swift and often intentional degradation of online platforms at the hands of greedy big tech executives betting on their users’ inability to migrate elsewhere, no matter how, well, shitty their sites or services became.

The utility of “enshittification” as a descriptor is its built-in semantic blame: Enshittification is an action noun, a thing done by cynical, entitled people crap-ifying their own creations to increase profit margins. Everything the fuck else is on entire fire these days; why shouldn’t a beloved online shopping destination also get in on the zeitgeist?

But part of what’s so maddening about the decline of eShakti is that, unlike enshittification at Facebook, Google, or a host of other outfits, the public hasn’t heard from the company’s higher-ups justifying its new direction or, in this case, lack thereof. And that’s only what it looks like from the consumer side. More distressingly, eShakti’s downfall reportedly came with neither warning nor explanation to its own workers. 

In August 2024, a user calling themselves “ExEshakti Employee” posted a comment on the Wardrobe Oxygen fashion site describing an awful scene outside an eShakti factory in India, writing that “E-shakti [sic] has officially shut down. None of the factories that used to manufacture for them have made a single garment in the last month.” They continued: “All the current employees were seen standing outside the closed offices. All the factories that worked for them are left without work and obviously no pay.”

The apparent ex-employee’s comment came amid growing consternation from eShakti shoppers complaining online, many alongside “ExEshakti Employee” in the Wardrobe Oxygen comments section and elsewhere. So many shoppers have registered their grievances with the Better Business Bureau that the consumer watchdog presently considers eShakti “not BBB accredited.”

Many report reaching out to the company only to hear nothing at all back, or only being given partial refunds after frustrating back-and-forth exchanges over weeks or months. Some have reported finally just disputing charges with their banks and credit cards; others simply gave up. I know a dozen or so of these complainants directly. The only reason I’m not one of them is because news of eShakti’s issues reached me before I could spend another couple hundred bucks on the site.

“When the company started falling apart, it felt personal,” said Alison Gary, Wardrobe Oxygen’s founder, when I reached out for her take. Like many fashion influencers, she’d recommended eShakti numerous times over the years. She also received peak pandemic-era updates on the company’s status and events, believing they were running according to the pro-worker values they espoused on their “about” page. But when Gary got wind of problems there with no explanation from management, she worked quickly to correct the record in a blog post that’s now one of the top search results for answers to the mystery of the eShakti crash.

She told me: “I hated knowing that I recommended a retailer that was stealing money from customers, making up excuses, not responding to customer queries, and when they did send orders, they were subpar fabrics and shoddy construction. I had to write my piece as a PSA to protect my community and those who found my article.”

I reached out to eShakti via their web contact form and emailed eShakti’s founder and CEO, B G Krishnan, hoping to get clarity on what might have happened, to no avail. The “ExEshakti Employee” commenter on Wardrobe Oxygen indicated workers have filed lawsuits against the company, but I was unable to track down anything concrete, either in the United States, where eShakti operated offices in New York and Oregon, or in India. There have been reports of factory fires and floods in the areas where eShakti’s operations were located in Chennai and Noida, but nothing definitive or official. Indian business news reports from summer 2024 indicate eShakti was operating at a loss even as its revenues had increased. The company’s customer help phone line now goes directly to a no-longer-in-service message. 

A hallmark of enshittification is its endemic, grandiose disdain for users and customers. Using an enshittified product or platform doesn’t just suck all on its own: It sucks because you know someone meant for it to be that way, out of purposeful disregard. It’s a feeling plus-size fashion consumers know all too well, an extension of society’s widespread fatphobia in general. As The Flytrap’s own Evette Dionne put it in a recent piece celebrating the new visibility of fat, Black women on television: “Our bodies have long been treated as a societal conundrum, a complex puzzle in need of being solved.” For plus-size shoppers—especially people who wear sizes above a U.S. 18—enshittification is hardly a new phenomenon. It’s more aptly described as the mainstream fashion industry’s longtime modus operandi, even though the inclusive- and expansive-sizing market holds strong potential, seeing as how the average shopper these days wears a size 14 or above. 

eShakti was hardly a bastion of plus-size representation, but at least it never played dress-up with the literal body politics of fat liberation (as Old Navy’s short-lived, in-store “BODEQUALITY” campaign did). If you couldn’t preview what a tropical-print wrap dress might look like on a size 26 body on eShakti’s website, you could at least see what it looked like on your body, in your own mirror. And for a lot of shoppers, that was a relief on its own: to simply not be marketed-down to with gimmicks and false promises. It was enough to just be able to order cute clothes in the right size.

The company seemed to know its niche. As late as April 2023, eShakti CEO Krishnan was giving interviews about being a “disruptor” in the online retail industry, talking about inspirational business quotes with Authority Magazine on Medium and hyping eShakti’s new “widget,” which he said would make it possible for “any online store” to “offer eShakti’s customized clothes instantaneously without any tech requirements,” making “customization more widely available.”

Customization was a major draw for eShakti shoppers, not just because it’s nice to have clothes that actually fit, but because their made-to-order model signaled the promise of more sustainability and less waste. eShakti’s target consumer base is the ideal market for just that kind of thing: fashion-minded folks with more-than-Forever-21 money to spend, many of whom have been edged out of in-store shopping because of sizing limitations and low quality.

“Today’s plus-size consumer is in her 40s, she’s an expert, and she’s more discerning,” said Marie Denee, a fashion influencer and founder and CEO of the wildly popular site The Curvy Fashionista. That consumer, she said, is “more self-assured, and she can see through the okie-doke” from fashion brands making a money grab without investing meaningfully in reflecting plus-size shoppers back to themselves. And that was always kind of a weird thing about eShakti—you could order customized plus-plus-and-plus sizes from the site, but never see the clothes modeled on anyone besides a straight-sized, maybe even AI-generated, model.

Denee likened this marketing tactic to “dating in the dark,” saying “they’re afraid to be seen with us, but they’ll take our money.” She described eShakti’s apparent demise as, on top of everything else, a potentially missed opportunity to build on a loyal customer base that, fundamentally, just wants to be seen. If eShakti were to re-emerge and really build back trust with consumers, Denee says “they would have to over-over correct, and it couldn’t be for a season, it would have to be part of the integration of the brand.”

Of course, eShakti would need to be operational in the first place for any of that to happen. In retrospect, it’s unsettling to imagine Krishnan hyping the new eShakti customization widget in the press at roughly the same time that the business’s operations began hitting serious bumps. Whatever the cause of its decline—a profit-tanking pandemic, natural disasters, or some as-yet-unkowable secret third thing—eShakti seems to be in a bizarre kind of stasis for now. The site still exists, minus the check-out function. This at least prevents new customers from being trapped in an endless lost-orders loop, but the site still prominently features positive reviews—via SiteJabber—left by users as recently as May 2024. 

I was skeptical about the veracity of these reviews, so I tried to track down a few of the supposedly satisfied customers whose names are still being used by eShakti on its homepage as endorsements, though the site is no longer taking orders. When I emailed with a woman from the U.S. named Laura Marty, she clarified: “When I wrote the review, I had a high opinion of the company.” She’d had a delayed order, but it had come through. But subsequent orders haven’t, and now she has bigger concerns, telling me: “It mainly makes me sad and concerned for the well-being of the employees who made the garments. Their site said how they provide insurance and pensions for their employees in India. If they aren’t fulfilling orders, are they still paying the workers?”

Marty said she lost $90 on a final, mostly unfilled order made in June 2024, but it mattered little in light of the situation in which eShakti has reportedly left its workers: “That’s nothing,” she said, “compared to women who might have lost their only source of income.”

Though eShakti never explicitly promoted itself as a plus-size fashion destination, it certainly sold itself as going above and beyond for its workers—indeed it still does, on that zombie “about” page. Customized dresses with pockets are nice, but back pay and benefits for the people who once made them would wear a hell of a lot better. 

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copyedited by Evette Dionne.