Corporate sellout. That’s the epithet social media users have adopted to describe Bonobos in the wake of its recent sale to Walmart for $310 million, and why not?

  It’s a reaction that Dunn seemingly anticipated, which is why the Bonobos CEO (also soon to be SVP of Digital Consumer Brands for Walmart U.S. eCommerce) wrote a post on Medium defending his rationale for the deal. The problem is that the essay, generically titled “The Future of Brands,” is short on insight and long on faux-intellectual musings (“I have come to an odd belief, which is that we don’t make decisions so much as the decisions make us”) and obfuscating corporate speak. Dunn writes that he was initially against the deal but then, well, “the world is changing faster than we thought” and that he was convinced of the path by Marc Lore, the CEO of another e-commerce company gulped up by Wal-Mart. You have to scroll through almost 600 words to find the post’s key sentence: With our model proven, we now want to become the market leader in all of premium menswear.

Here’s an abbreviated transcript of that previously unpublished interview from April of last year:

I think it’s about evolution. There’s this fundamental belief we have in life when we’re not considering our best self, which is that we’re static. We’re done. We are who we are. Isn’t it more optimistic and more hopeful to think about the fact that we can evolve? So at Bonobos we talk about these five values—positive energy, empathy, judgement, self awareness and intellectual honesty.

I’m saying that we can’t have feminism without a comparable focus on what it means to be a man. Feminism can’t exist in a vacuum without men reexamining what we do. As a men’s brand, I want to add a little bit to that conversation over time. I don’t think we’ve really contributed to that conversation yet. We’re contributing in spirit by building a brand that we think is a better way to buy clothes. But eventually, we want to contribute more to that conversation. Like the Navigator we aspire to serve, we’re trying to figure out what that means.