SPOTLIGHT: PATAGONIA

SPOTLIGHT

Words Matt Westby Photos Xxxxxxxx

“EARTH IS NOW OUR ONLY SHAREHOLDER…”

For almost 50 years, Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, has set the bar for ethical and sustainable business practice. Now he’s giving the company away so its profits can be used to fight the climate crisis, writes Sam Haddad.

Last September, when Patagonia employees, athletes and brand ambassadors were asked to assemble at the company’s California headquarters – or tune in remotely from wherever they were in the world – they had no idea what to expect. They were greeted by a film of their 83-year-old founder and lodestar, Yvon Chouinard, sitting on a wooden chair in a forest full of silver birch, announcing that he was giving away the company. Not selling, not going public, but transferring Patagonia’s ownership into a trust and non-profit organisation to aggressively fight the climate crisis. The decision, which Chouinard then explained to employees in person, was bold – even shocking – but it was also wholly in keeping with his strong ethical approach to running a responsible and accountable business. This is, after all, a man who has never hidden his disdain for the corporate world and the havoc that a growth-at-all-costs mentality has wreaked on his beloved natural world. As he explained in a company statement immediately after the event: “I never wanted to be a businessman.” Chouinard had fallen in love with climbing and the outdoors during the 1960s. He was one of the original dirtbags, living out of a van decades before the lifestyle became a hashtag and setting up camp in California’s Yosemite Valley, where he survived off old cans of cat food. A self-taught blacksmith, he began crafting climbing gear for himself and his friends out of necessity, because they needed reliable kit, before moving onto apparel and setting up Patagonia in 1973. Environmental activism was baked into the brand from the start, when employees protested against a development which would threaten a local surf break and river ecosystem. While innovative new product developments including fleeces, base layers and board shorts drove up the popularity of the label, its growth always seemed to sit uncomfortably with Chouinard, and as he and his colleagues began to realise the gravity of the environmental crisis – and his company’s role within the economic system that caused it – he committed to using Patagonia to change the way business was done. “If we could do the right thing while making enough to pay the bills, [then] we could influence customers and other businesses, and maybe change the system along the way,” he said. And change it they did.

Yvon (left) joins Kris and Doug Tompkins on an early trip across the Yendegaia National Park, Chile

Setting the bar

Since 1986, Patagonia has donated 10% of company profits or 1% of sales – whichever is highest – to environmental groups, and in 2002 they set up the global movement 1% For The Planet to encourage other businesses to do the same. At the workplace level, they were early adopters of fair working practices throughout their supply chain and one of the first companies in the US to introduce sick pay, as well as on-site childcare for employees. In 2005, Chouinard published the book Let My People Go Surfing as a clarion call to fellow business leaders and entrepreneurs. It championed the benefits of running a responsible company that also gives employees a great work/life balance – including time to go surfing, snowboarding, climbing or whatever else they like doing in the outdoors when they need to. And at the heart of it all is an ethical product. Patagonia was one of the first companies to use organic cotton and other less harmful materials throughout their lines, one of the first to offer a free repair service via their ‘Worn Wear’ programme, and perhaps most significantly of all, they took a massive swing at rampant consumerism with their ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ campaign on Black

Tom Frost, Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt and Yvon Chouinard on the summit of El Capitan on 30 October 1964

‘This is a man who has never hidden his disdain for the corporate world’

Friday in 2011, which encouraged customers to reject fast fashion and buy only the things they truly needed. In 2018, they changed the company’s mission statement to one crystal clear goal: ‘We’re in business to save our home planet.’ And this year, as part of a neoprene-free wetsuit campaign, they have taken the bold step of praising rivals’ products alongside their own. Such initiatives have helped make Patagonia more popular than ever. Current sales fi gures sit at around $1 billion per year, prompting Forbes magazine to list Chouinard as a billionaire – a move that really rankled him and set the ball rolling for his eventual decision to give away the company. He could not simply sell it to the highest bidder and donate the proceeds to climate action, as he couldn’t be sure a new owner would maintain Patagonia’s strict values or keep his staff employed. Meanwhile, his children didn’t want to inherit the business, and he worried that taking it public would have been a “disaster” as even public companies with noble intentions are under too much pressure to deliver short-term profi ts. “There were no good options available,” he explains. “So, we created our own.” Under the new arrangement, 100% of the company’s voting stock will go to the Patagonia Purpose Trust to protect the company’s values, and Patagonia’s profi ts will go to the Holdfast Collective, a new non-profi t they’ve created to fi ght the environmental crisis and defend nature. “Instead of “going public”, we’re “going purpose”, he concludes – daring others, once again, to follow their lead.