I was delighted to attend a talk by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. Here are my notes with excerpts from their website.
Yvon’s interest in climbing began with his membership in the Southern California Falconry Club at age 14. He began climbing cliff faces to see the falcon aeries. The only pitons available at the time were made of soft iron, placed once and left behind. Yvon decided to make his own chrome-molybdenum steel pitons and became a blacksmith making two an hour which he sold for $1.50 each. Word spread and his pitons and later camping equipment were in high demand. He partnered with an aeronautical engineer, Tom Frost in 1965 and in the 9 years they were together, they redesigned and improved almost every climbing tool, to make them stronger, lighter, simpler, and more functional. They would return from every trip to the mountains with new ideas for improving existing tools.
By 1970, Chouinard Equipment had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. It had also become an environmental villain because its gear was damaging the rock. After an ascent of the degraded Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, they decided to phase out of the piton business, their first environmental step on a long journey.
In 1972, they introduced an alternative, aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather then hammered in and out of cracks. They were introduced in their first catalog that same year.
The catalog opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons. A 14-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph:
There is a word for it, and the word is clean. Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber. Clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out, leaving the rock scarred and the next climber’s experience less natural. Clean because the climber’s protection leaves little trace of his ascension. Clean is climbing the rock without changing it; a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.
Within a few months chocks sold faster than they could be made.
At the time climbing clothing was usually drab grey with little color and active sportswear had not been born. On a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, Chouinard bought a regulation team rugby shirt to wear rock climbing. Overbuilt to withstand the rigors of rugby, it had a collar that would keep the hardware slings from cutting into the neck. It was blue, with two red and one yellow center stripe across the chest. Back in the States, Chouinard wore it around his climbing friends, who asked where they could get one.
They ordered a few shirts from Umbro, in England which quickly sold out. They couldn’t keep them in stock, and soon began ordering shirts from New Zealand and Argentina as well. Other companies followed suit and they soon realized that they had introduced a minor fashion craze to the United States. They began to see clothing as a way to help support the marginally profitable hardware business, and by 1972 we were selling polyurethane rain cagoules and bivouac sacks from Scotland, boiled-wool gloves and mittens from Austria, and hand-knit reversible “schizo” hats from Boulder.
The new clothing business was named Patagonia to reflect “romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors.”
They introduced insulated and waterproof clothing with Capilene® and Synchilla®, sales soared and have had an active R+D program ever since introducing a palette of colors. They made the INC 500′s fastest growing companies list.
In 1991, with the recession, their business took a dramatic nosedive and their loan was called forcing them to lay off 20% of their staff. They have kept growth – and borrowing – to a modest scale ever since.
Part of the Patagonia culture was allowing team members to dress however they wished, even barefooted. Peple ran or surfed at lunch or played vollyball in the sandpit at the back of the building. The company sponsored ski and climbing trips.
There are no private offices that sometimes creates distractions but helps keep communication open. Their cafeteria is a gathering place for employees and serves mostly vegetarian food. They opened a child care center, one of only 150 in the country at the time. (Today there are more than 3000). This atmosphere helps keep the business more family than corporate. Flexible hours and job sharing were introduced.
In 1986, Patagonia committed to donate 10% of profits each year to these groups. We later upped the ante to 1% of sales, or 10% of profits, whichever was greater. They have kept to that commitment every year since.
In 1988, they initiated their first national environmental campaign on behalf of an alternative master plan to deurbanize the Yosemite Valley. Each year since, they have undertaken a major education campaign on an environmental issue. They took an early position against globalization of trade where it means compromise of environmental and labor standards. They have argued for dam removal where silting, marginally useful dams compromise fish life. They have supported wild lands projects that seek to preserve ecosystems whole and create corridors for wildlife to roam. They hold, every eighteen months, a “Tools for Activists” conference to teach marketing and publicity skills to some of the groups we work with.
They also, early on, began initial steps to reduce their own role as a corporate polluter and have been using recycled-content paper for their catalogs since the mid-eighties. They worked with Malden Mills to develop recycled polyester for use in their Synchilla fleece.
Their distribution center in Reno, opened in 1996 and achieved a 60% reduction in energy use through solar-tracking skylights and radiant heating; they used recycled content for everything from rebar to carpet to the partitions between urinals. They retrofitted lighting systems in existing stores, and build-outs for new stores became increasingly environmentally friendly. They assessed the dyes they used and eliminated colors from the line that required the use of toxic metals and sulfides. Most importantly, since the early nineties, they have made environmental responsibility a key element of everyone’s job.
They commissioned an independent research company to assess the environmental impact of four major fibers. They discovered the worst of all fibers was cotton that used 25% of all toxic pesticides used in agriculture harming the environment with strong ties to the damage of workers health. In 1994, they made the decision to go 100% organic and had 18 months to make the switch for 66 products and only 4 months to line up the fabric. They succeeded and today every Patagonia product made of cotton is organic with increasing use of hemp and recycled polyester.
“We still pursue climbing and surfing, activities that entail risk, require soul, and invite reflection. We favor informal travels with friends – doing what we love to do – to the camera-covered event. We can’t bring ourselves to knowingly make a mediocre product. And we cannot avert our eyes from the harm done, by all of us, to our one and only home. ”
At the end of his talk, Yvon shared two new ideas he is implementing. When a customer comes into a Patagonia store and asks a sales rep for a product, they will from this point on ask “Do you really need this?” And, they are developing a label that will tell buyers what a product is made of, where a product is made, how it is made, by whom it is made and under what conditions and insure it is non-toxic from material to manufacturing.
