Health-focused fast food restaurant chain sweetgreen is in hot waters. New York streetwear brand Market and founder Mike Cherman have taken to social media to call out sweetgreen for stealing an apparel design idea that they have claimed to have pitched to the restaurant chain last year.
Taking to their combined hundreds of thousands of followers, Cherman and Market posted about pitching a collaboration idea to sweetgreen back in September 2023. Sharing screenshots from an email conversation they had directly with the founder Nathaniel Ru, they showed fans that there was initial interest in a collaboration between the two. Market pitched the idea of using "the iconic silhouettes and colors of Kale and Arugula to create a custom camouflage pattern out of them for a collaborative collection spanning from printable graphics to home goods to elevated cut & sew garments." The email showed Ru interested in the idea, even posing a call between Market's team and sweetgreens' creative director Jillian. Market also shared their presentation pitch, posting screenshots of mockups of what the Kale and Arugula camo print could look like. However, it seems that following their presentation, sweetgreen never came back to Market to confirm the collaboration.
Fast forward to today, sweetgreen announces a new collaboration with with Los Angeles-based Everybody.World, which proclaims they make "mindful basics." Following the reveal of the kale camo print hoodie, Market has called out sweetgreen stating, "For a company that does almost $700 million in sales, you can afford to do the right thing and not steal our ideas without compensation." They even took to posting some of the comments following the reveal, showing sweetgreen taking credit for the creativity behind the collaboration. Following Market's call out, fans have taken to the comment section of the posts, demanding for answers from sweetgreen. At the time of writing, sweetgreen has not released a statement.
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