reason for being Patagonia’s Mission StatementBuild the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
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Yvon Chouinard at camp
clinging t o Patagonia grew out of a small company that made tools for climbers. Alpinism remains at the heart of a worldwide business that still makes clothes for climbing – as well as for skiing, snowboarding, surfing, fly fishing,
paddling and trail running. These are all silent sports. None requires a motor; none delivers the cheers of a crowd. In each sport, reward comes in the form of hard-won grace and moments of connection between us and nature.
“ r e wa r d comes in the f o r m of hard -won grace and mo m e n t s of co n n e c t i o n b e t we e n u s a n d n a t u r e .”
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Climbing in the Alps
an ideal Their values reflect those of a busness started by a band of climbers and surfers, and the minimalist style they promoted. The approach they take towards product design demonstrates a bias for simplicity and utility. It seems for those at Patagonia, a love of wild and beautiful places demands participation in the fight to save them, and to help reverse the steep decline in the overall environmental health of our planet. Patagonia donates their time, services and at least 1% of their sales to hundreds of grassroots environmental groups all over the world who work to help reverse the tide. They know that their business activity – from lighting stores to dyeing shirts – creates pollution as a by-product. So Patagonia works steadily to reduce those harms. They use recycled polyester in many of their clothes and only organic, rather than pesticideintensive, cotton. They have stay true to their core values during thirty-plus years in business has helped create a company one would be proud to run and work for. And their focus on making the best products possible has brought great success in the marketplace.
PATAGONIA VALUES QUALITY: Pursuit of ever-greater quality in everything they do. INTEGRITY: Relationships built on both integrity and respect. ENVIRONMENTALISM: Serve as a catalyst for personal and corporate action. NOT BOUND BY CONVENTION: Their success, and much of the fun lies in developing innovative ways to do things.
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beginnings and blacksmithery Yvon Chouinard adamant surfer
Y VON CHOUINARD
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Patagonia logo
Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder, got his start as a climber in 1953 as a 14-year-old member of the Southern California Falconry Club, which trained hawks and falcons for hunting. After one of the adult leaders, Don Prentice, taught the boys how to rappel down the cliffs to the falcon aeries, Yvon and his friends became so fond of the sport they started hopping freight trains to the west end of the San Fernando Valley, to the sandstone cliffs of Stoney Point. There, eventually, they learned to climb up as well as rappel down.
Yosemite, multiday ascents required hundreds of placements. Chouinard, after meeting John Salathé, a Swiss climber and Swedenborgian mystic who had once made hard-iron pitons out of Model A axles, decided to make his own reusable hardware. In 1957, he went to a junkyard and bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, some tongs and hammers, and started teaching himself how to blacksmith.
Chouinard made his first pitons from an old harvester blade and tried them out with T.M. Herbert Chouinard started hanging out at on early ascents of the Lost Arrow Stoney Point on every weekend in the Chimney and the North Face of winter, and at Tahquitz Rock above Sentinel Rock in Yosemite. The word Palm Springs in the fall and spring. spread and soon friends had to have There he met some other young Chouinard’s chrome-molybdenum climbers who belonged to the Sierra steel pitons. Before he knew it he Club, including TM Herbert, Royal was in business. He could forge two Robbins, and Tom Frost. Eventually, of his in an hour, and sold them for the friends moved on from Tahquitz $1.50 each. to Yosemite, to teach themselves to Chouinard built a small shop in climb its big walls. his parents’ backyard in Burbank. The only pitons available at that Most of his tools were portable, so time were made of soft iron, placed he could load up his car and travel once, then left in the rock. But in the California coast from Big Sur to
San Diego, surfing. After a session, he would haul his anvil down to the beach and cut out angle pitons with a cold chisel and hammer before moving on.
Interview with Patagonia founder
For the next few years, Chouinard forged pitons during the winter months, spent April to July on the walls of Yosemite, then headed out of the heat of summer for the high mountains of Wyoming and Canada, then back to Yosemite in the fall. The profits were slim, though. For weeks and weeks at a time, he’d live on fifty cents to a dollar a day. 6
h e l p i n g WHAT THEY DO Since 1985, Patagonia has pledged 1% of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment. They’ve awarded over 31 million dollars in cash and in-kind donations to domestic and international grassroots environmental groups making a difference in their local communities. Now the founder of Patagonia,Yvon Chouinard, and Craig Mathews, owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, have created a non-profit corporation with the sole purpose of encouraging businesses to give back to the environment.
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Fortune Magazine cover
t h e Patagonia National Park Creating a National Park. In addition to performing the many tasks required to run a successful outdoor clothing company, Patagonia employees are helping to create a new national park. To date, about 50 have traveled in groups of six to Chilean Patagonia – the company’s namesake – to spend three weeks digging out fence posts, rolling up wire and removing nonnative plants.
Environmental Grants Patagonia gives at the grassroots level to innovative groups overlooked or rejected by other corporate donors. Patagonia funds activists who take radical and strategic steps to protect habitat, wilderness and biodiversity. They have given more than $31 million to more than 1,000 organizations since their grants program began.
e n v i r o n m e n t Conservation Alliance
Garment Recycling
Plugging Into Renewables
In 1989, Patagonia co-founded The Conservation Alliance, to encourage other companies in the outdoor industry to give money to environmental organizations and to become more involved in environmental work.
Way too much of what is made these days ends up in the trash at the end of its useful life. At Patagonia, they’re working to change that.
Abandoned by Patagonia’s electricity provider, baffled by the electric utilities, yet still bent on doing the right thing, last year Patagonia built their own power plant in the parking lot at our headquarters in Ventura, California.
The Alliance now boasts 155 member companies, each of which contributes annual dues to a central fund. Patagonia gives to the alliance each year, and maintains a permanent seat on the board of directors. Twice yearly, the Alliance donates 100 percent of its membership dues to grassroots environmental groups working to protect threatened wildlands and biodiversity. In 2007, it granted $800,000 to 29 organizations. Grants since 1989 total over $6.5 million.
In 2005 Patagonia launched their Common Threads Garment Recycling Program, through which customers could return their worn out Capilene® Performance Baselayers for recycling. They’ve since been able to expand the list of recyclable garments to include worn out Patagonia® fleece, Polartec® fleece clothing (from any maker), Patagonia cotton T-shirts, and now some additional polyester and nylon 6 products that come with a Common Threads tag.
It’s not like the ones that generate most of the electricity for Southern California – coal-fired, oil-fired, gas-fired, nuclear – but instead derives its electrons from a clean, renewable and seemingly inexhaustible source – the sun.
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A series of Patagonia employees doing what they love most.
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“ N o l o n g e r c a n we a s s u m e t h e E a r t h’s r e s o u r c e s a r e li m i t l e s s . M o un t a in s a r e fin i t e , a n d d e s p i t e t h e i r m a s s ive a p p e a r a n c e , t h e y a r e f r a g il e .”
money isn’t everything E N V I R O N M E N TA L I N T E R N S H I P S After many years of giving money to activists, Patagonia realized that if they could share profits, they could also supply time and muscle. And many Patagonia employees, energized by links to environmental groups or furious about the creeping ruination of favorite wild places, were in a fighting mood. So in 1993, they created the Patagonia Employee Internship Program.
Through the program, employees can leave their jobs at Patagonia for up to two months to work full-time for the environmental group of their choice. Patagonia continues to pay employees’ salaries and benefits while they’re gone, and the environmental group gets them for free. About 600 employees have interned for groups worldwide since the program began. On this, the program’s 15-year anniversary, 64 employees donated sweat and talent to groups for anywhere from a few days to two months. Dealer Services rep, Ting Hammond, helped the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association promote the use of alternative
transportation in Taipei, while Louise Danel, a buyer from our Annecy office, built solar ovens in rural Bolivia with NGO Bolivia Inti. Elizabeth Ruiz, a retail associate in our NYC SoHo store, worked with Surfrider Foundation in Puerto Rico to reduce the amount of trash on island beaches. Employees rock-hopped Southern California watersheds eradicating invasive plants, and Bryn Pitterle, a product developer in Ventura, spent two months on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula monitoring the health of waters in the Cook Inlet. Not all internships entailed fieldwork. Drew Story, an information technology fellow in Ventura, used his considerable computer experience to develop a Web advocacy tool for the Nevada Wilderness Project in Reno. The Internship Program not only provides employees with wonderful opportunities, and environmental groups with free labor, it also adds to the greater Patagonia culture. Interns return with a powerful sense of purpose and accomplishment they share with their colleagues, which inspires other employees to take advantage of the program. in different ways.
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