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For a man that just wanted to pursue what we now call ‘extreme’ or ‘adventure’ sports, the founder and owner of the outdoor equipment and apparel company Patagonia has done very well indeed. In 2006, Patagonia turned over $267 million, and employed around 1300 people.
Much of the company is based on catalogue orders, but it does operate retail outlets in the USA, Japan, Korea and Europe. The company now caters for hikers and trekkers, skiers, climbers and anglers. Its carries a full range of clothes and has pioneered the practice of layering (as opposed to fewer, heavier clothes), and worked hard with suppliers to produce wicking – fast drying fabrics that are accepted as the norm today.
Patagonia is renowned for its quality and innovative nature of its products, but also for its remarkable commitment to sustainable business and environmental causes.
Like Terry Thomas ’Co-operative Bank and Ray Anderson’s Interface, Chouinard’s
Patagonia is an icon of a values-led business. Anyone picking up a Patagonia catalogue could not fail to understand the direction from which the company comes.
However, it would be less apparent to those purchasing the clothes through dealers and intermediaries.
Many mainstream business people would view Chouinard as an eccentric who uses an excellent first-hand understanding of his market, and an intolerance of things that do not work properly, to indulge his commitment to the environment. While this may result in a grudging respect in some quarters, many others do not take well to his fervour. Michael Hiltzik said that Chouinard is
‘someone who is perfectly right in principle, but an insufferable person’. His friend and supporter, the former
NBC News anchor man Tom Brokaw said of Chouinard, that ‘he walks the walk more than anyone else I know in
American business’.
Yvon Chouinard
(courtesy: Sam Beebe)
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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia
Chouinard himself explains (Patagonia, 2007) that ‘what we want to do – the reason we are in business – is to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crises’. The Mission Statement encompasses quality, advocacy and care for the environment when it says that the company will ‘ make the best product, do no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crises ’ .
Chouinard calls the five guidelines that motivate and drive Patagonia his ‗business philosophy‘ and, like the products he sells, it is simple yet highly effective at communicating his view of what a business is created to achieve. The five guidelines are:
1. Lead an examined life – Know the consequences of our actions. Much of the damage to the environment is done either unintentionally, or through ignorance, or by wilfully ignoring the chain decisions that lead to bad results.
2. Clean up our act – Once we understand the results of our actions, change them.
3. Do our penance – No matter how much we clean up our act, all of us are still polluters. So give back.
4. Support civil democracy – When we give back we support activist groups working on the front lines. They are the most effective agents of change in our democracy.
5. Influence other companies – Lead by example.
Note the absence of any reference to money. Chouinard (2005) is clear about the generation of profit and the rate of growth. He says that ‘ its OK to be eccentric as long as you are rich, otherwise you are just crazy’. The motivation to be profitable comes from an interest in producing products that have low environmental impact, help activists, yet reap a reward for this stance in the market place.
The attitude is closer to a social enterprise (a business that produces surplus to invest in righting a social wrong) than a conventional manufacturer.
Much of this thinking came out of a company crisis in 1991, when Patagonia had to lay off 20 per cent of its workforce (over 120 people). The problem came from a decline in sales, coupled with an assumption that rapid growth would continue unabated. It made Chouinard and his wife Malinda question the assumptions behind the business, and made them ask themselves why they were in business in the first place. In the process, this opened up everything they were doing for discussion with senior managers. Typically, Chouinard took them to the windswept mountains of
Patagonia in Argentina to do this. This was the region that inspired the name of the company after all, and when they came back they put together a new values statement. The first part of the statement reveals the true nature and depth of the culture that runs through Patagonia:
We begin with the premise that all life on Earth is facing a critical time, during which survivability will be the issue that increasingly dominates public concern. Where

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia survivability is not the issue, the quality of the human experience of life may be, as well as the decline in the health of the natural world as reflected in the loss of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and the planet’s life support systems.
The root causes of this situation include basic values embodied in our economic system, including the values of the corporate world. Primary among the problematic corporate values are the primacy of expansion and short-term profit over other considerations such as quality, sustainability, environmental and human health and environmental conditions.
The fundamental goal of this corporation is to operate in such a manner that we are fully aware of the above conditions, and attempt to re-order the hierarchy of corporate values, while producing products that enhance both human and environmental conditions.
These values, guidelines and mission statement produced an impressive, and often trailblazing, range of initiatives. Patagonia questions everything they do, and it applies life cycle assessments and whole-life costing techniques to the whole process and the supply chain. Since 1993, the company has recycled over 92 million plastic drinks bottles into fleeces and other clothing. They estimate that 150 jackets save 42 (USA) gallons of crude oil.
After analysing the impact of commercial cotton, they found that it is responsible for the spread of 25 per cent of global insecticide production, and 10 per cent of the world ’ s pesticides, while occupying less than 3 per cent of the farmed land area. In
1994, they decided to change to organic cotton, even though it was up to twice as expensive, and cotton goods represented 20 per cent of company revenue. By 1996, they had switched their 66 cotton products and achieved their goal. The shift ensured that Patagonia almost single-handedly created an organic cotton agriculture sector in southern California, and put more organic cotton clothes on the market than had ever been seen before.
It took a further decade, but today the organic cotton market is blossoming, with the
UK market set to expand by 50 per cent in 2007. Sales in the UK will reach $120 million and the global sales are expected to top $2.6 billion by the end of 2008 (Soil
Association, 2007; Organic Exchange, 2007).
Patagonia’s efforts also ran to replacing toxic dies. The company has invested in solar panels, bought wind farm electricity, recycled large amounts of its own waste, and built an award-winning warehouse in Reno Nevada, only the second distribution
Patagonia store—Buenos Aires
(courtesy: Patagonia

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia centre in the whole of the USA to be given a gold level LEED certificate. They dropped the plastic wallets and cardboard sleeves used to package underwear and hung them loose on racks. Having been warned that sales would drop, they found they actually increased by 28 per cent (customers were able to feel the quality), and saved $150 000 and 12 tons of packaging year on year.
Another of Patagonia’s achievements of note is ‘1 per cent for the Planet’ , an alliance of businesses pledging to donate 1 per cent of their sales towards active efforts to restore the natural environment. Co-founded with Blue Ribbon Flies during a fishing trip, 1 per cent FTP avoids fair-weather corporate donations by sourcing the money from sales and not profits. This means that members give whether they have a good year or a bad year. Membership reached nearly 500 businesses in 2006, with a combined contribution of over $6 million. Patagonia has, to date, given over $29 million in grants and in-kind donations to more than 1000 organisations.
Even by the yardstick of companies that have tried to stand out as sustainable exemplars, the Patagonia story is remarkable. Simply the sheer volume of achievements, juxtaposed with commercial success, makes it a tale that is almost, but not quite, too good to be true. If Chouinard is a one-off, then it would be difficult for aspiring sustainable businesses to draw any lessons from his story. However, an examination of how he started, and his early inspirations, could easily have affected almost anyone.
Yvon Chouinard was born in Maine in 1938, but moved to southern California when he was eight. During the trip he saw his mother give the family ’ s entire supply of preserved corn to a Hopi woman, to feed her hungry children. His father was French
Canadian and a blacksmith by trade. He did not fare well at school. He was small, did not speak English very well, and had a ‘ girl’s ’ name. His grades did not improve even when he transferred to another school, and he became a loner. He found solace by finding isolated places to fish, and hunted rabbits with a bow and arrow. High
School was not much better and he was often in trouble. He was athletic, but did not like performing in front of a crowd, and so continued to find his better times on his own in the ocean, or the hills surrounding Los Angeles.
His lifelong love of rock climbing came from his membership of the Southern California Falconry Club. In the spring, eggs were taken from hawk nests and young birds banded. He learned to abseil down the cliff faces, and was amazed one day to find a climber coming up the other way. In order to pursue his interest in climbing, he decided to employ the knowledge gained from his father to manufacture pitons, and started selling them to other climbers. Pitons are metal spikes that were hammered into the rock as an anchor point for the climbing ropes. He started his small business (Chouinard Equipment Co.) in 1964, and by
1970 he was the largest supplier of climbing gear in the USA. Previously all the equipment had been imported from Europe, but it was Chouinard’s simple elegant and lighter design that caught the eye of the climbers.
It was after ascending The Nose, on El Capitan, one of the more challenging faces in
Yosemite National Park, that he noticed that pitons were damaging the mountain. He decided to phase out the spikes, and adapt a chock and cable method he had heard

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia that the British were using. This design used a lump of metal, often shaped like a nut
(the kind that fi ts a bolt) that can be wedged into cracks and then pulled out when the climber is higher on the face. Chouinard produced his catalogue in 1972 with a
14-page editorial essay explaining the damage that ordinary pitons were doing, and showing how to use the new equipment, which he said would result in ‘ clean climbing ’. Within months Chouinard was selling his new chocks faster than he could make them.
It was soon after this that Chouinard got his idea for making clothing. First, he remembered an old corduroy mill he had seen in England that made durable work clothes before denim was made, and had them send him the cloth to be made into climbing trousers. In 1970, during a trip to Scotland, he was impressed with the tough fabric that went into rugby jerseys, and the overbuilt collar in particular, which he could fold up to protect his neck from his hardware slings. He brought one back and found that all his friends wanted one. An order from Umbro sold out and soon he was ordering shirts from wherever rugby was played in the world. By 1974, he commissioned a factory to make his own in Hong Kong.
Yvon Chouinard was never interested in the day-to-day running of his company, and always tried to hire chief executives to manage the businesses. He saw himself as the research and development arm, travelling to far-fl ung parts of the world, climbing, fishing and surfing, but keeping his eyes open for new ideas, and trying out prototype clothes and equipment. Between the mid-1980s and mid- 1990s,
Patagonia grew its sales from $30 million to $100 million.
“ Yet within this whirlwind success story there is a recurring theme that defines Chouinard‘s character, and is generally a positive driver in his life. Whether it is Patagonia ‘ s support for
Patagonia outlet
(courtesy: Sam Beebe) environmental campaigns, the efforts that go into recruitment and staff support, or the work that has gone into customer communications, there is a consistent belief that ‗ the individual ‘ is the starting point for sustainable change.
As Chouinard travelled the world, he saw first hand the environmental destruction that was going on. He saw the felling of rainforests and the hunting of bush meat in Africa, and the industrial pollution in wilderness areas of Russia. Closer to home he witnessed the urbanisation of California, and the reduction of salmon in Wyoming rivers due to excessive damming. But while this made him feel sad and angry, it did not really come home to him that he could do much about it until something happened on his doorstep.
The clothing and equipment factory was located in Ventura near the ocean (handy for surfing). The city wanted to channel the Ventura River, so that the flood plain around it could be developed. The authority argued that there was very little wildlife remaining in the estuary, and that it would not affect the surf break. Chouinard attended the

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia city council meeting, where a young graduate student called Mark Capelli gave a photographic slide show that demonstrated that there was life in the river, including spawning fish. The plan was defeated, and Chouinard sponsored Capelli with office space and a small donation to help him keep up the fight for the river. In time, the water quality and flow of the river improved, and with it came more fish and wildlife.
The experience taught Chouinard that grassroots efforts really do succeed. But he also saw that he could make a difference by the support he gave to activists. He was greatly encouraged that environmental protection work was not just a vain attempt to stop progress, but that it could actually lead to improvements. Leaders and the bolt of light These paths led him, via many different schemes, to founding the ‘1 per cent
For the Planet’ group.
Back in the workplace, Chouinard and Malinda were also concentrating on the individual. In 1984, a new office building gave the company the opportunity to provide a staff child-care facility (one of only 150 in the whole of the USA at the time) and a staff cafeteria that sold healthy food. Management and training meetings were conducted where possible in natural settings, and later a staff committee was set up, elected from fellow employees, to award environmental grants.
The ‘ Let My People Go Surfing ’ initiative was a flexitime scheme, which allowed employees to be able to leave work at short notice to take advantage of the weather or the surf, or simply to enable them to order their family life in a more accommodating way. Chouinard justifies the policy by saying that ‘ it allows us to keep valuable employees who love their freedom and sports too much to settle for the constraints of a more regimented work environment ’ . His view on employing different kinds of people is explained when he says that: hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught in a codified way of doing business.
In 2004 and 2005, Patagonia made the top 25 medium sized companies (250–
1000 employees) in the Great Place to Work awards.
Chouinard is of the opinion that employees should either be committed to the values of the company, or at least should not mind working with a lot of people that live by these values. Over the years, the company has tried to hire people by word of mouth on personal recommendation to retain this cultural continuity. The same has applied to the hiring of management. Chouinard says that ‗ finding a dyed-in-the-wool business person to take up climbing or river running is a lot more difficult than teaching a person with a ready passion for the outdoors how to do the job ‘ .
This idea of hiring for affinity, or attitude or value set, is still very alien to the business world. However, while skills and experience can still remain the prime reason for

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia getting a job, it is hard to see how a culture of sustainable action can be fostered without a values set that employees can believe in. This is a serious fl aw when attempting to encourage the adherence to internal procedures, but a potential disaster when the unconvinced employees come face-to-face with the customer.
Hiring for attitude is rare, but certainly not unique to Patagonia. South Patagonia outlet
(courtesy: Sam Beebe)
West Airlines (SWA) love to tell the story of how they embed their culture in their workforce. SWA was the pioneer of the no-frills airline. Anyone travelling with them will be aware, painfully or joyously, of the quirky nature of the carrier.
The Hawaiian shirts worn by the crew (including the pilots), flying killer whale paint jobs, and the singing announcements from the cabin crew, leave passengers with few doubts about who they are flying with today. The founders (Rolllin King and
Herb Kellaher) decided that ‘ if you get your passengers to their destinations when they want to get there, on time, at the lowest possible fares, and make darn sure they have a good time doing it, people will fl y your airline’ (www.southwest. com/ about_swa ). The statistics bear them out. Since 1987, the airline has consistently had very low customer complaints.
One of the SWA secrets is that they hire for attitude and not skills. On a visit to their
Oakland base they told a group of social entrepreneurs from England that the interview process is geared to understand potential employees ’ personality and approach to life. They said that a few do get through the net, but as soon as they show signs of disaffection they are encouraged to fi nd another job. They added almost as an aside that while it was not a common occurrence, they had a pilot on their books that joined as a baggage handler. Once the laughs died down, and the unlikely fact sank in, it was a very powerful statement. SWA were also very proud to recount that after 9/11, when the aviation industry suffered a dramatic fall in passenger numbers, there were widespread lay-offs across the industry but not at SWA, where the workforce agreed to take a pay cut to keep the company going. They said that over that period, nobody was laid off.
These are impressive, even emotional stories, and while many businesses may not choose to emulate SWA, whether it is for sector or cultural reasons, the ‘ employee care ’ concept holds. It is surprising, however, that many more businesses do not choose to invest more in their workforce.
The fi nal application of Yvon Chouinard’s faith in the individual can be seen in his regular attempts to engage the customer. Chouinard learned very early, when he redesigned and sold his replacement pitons, that if you have a good design and combine this with a good argument, the product will do well. Since that time he

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia always assumed that the individual will be able to understand and act upon the information that Patagonia is offering to them. Essays on environmental issues are commissioned and printed in the catalogues, and display space is given over in retail stores to current campaigns. This helps their customers understand their stance on various issues.
Again, confiding to this degree in your customer base is rare, but others have tried a similar approach. In the UK, the medium sized Mid-
Counties Cooperative has helped customers in their supermarkets understand issues including fairtrade foods, the importance of supporting local farmers, and climate change. The messages are conveyed on plasma screens as shoppers move around the stores. They found that when they began these messages, there was a marked increase in the sale of fairtrade bananas, chocolate, tea and coffee. The Body Shop, under guidance of its late founder Anita Roddick, was also keen to explain why the business took so much care to ensure that the materials they bought from developing countries were obtained
Patagonia outlet
(courtesy: Nicolas Boullosa ) in an ethical manner. When The Body Shop suffered a dip in sales, the harder commercial management team that replaced Roddick and her husband toned down the campaigning elements of the company. Since its sale to L’Oreal, the social and environmental profile of The Body Shop has, to some extent, been revived.
Informing customer awareness about social and environmental campaigns and strategies does not always have to be overt. Ben & Jerry ’ s, the ice cream makers, have for many years tried to make their product with the minimum social and environmental impact. Their policy on fl avour suppliers is that they buy goods and services from ‘ producers and supplies that share our values
’ (www. benjerry.co.uk). Those values include using business as a tool for social and environmental change. Jerry Greenfield explains that ‘ nobody wants to buy something that was made by exploiting somebody else ’ . The fact that, unwittingly, many people do this every day does not diminish the aspiration. The interesting thing is that this sustainability message is not widely understood outside the USA. Most people in Europe have no idea that Ben & Jerry ’ s buy from flavour manufacturers that help to rehabilitate offenders, or are owned by ethnic minority entrepreneurs. And, unlike The Body Shop, the sustainable stance has not been toned down since the company’s takeover by Unilever.
There is a point here that brings us back to the Patagonia experience. Yvon
Chouinard understands that being sustainable is not a winning formula in itself. The business also has to be successful. Chouinard’s businesses are successful because of his fascination for improving the function of a product, and

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Individual conviction: Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia using the best materials and the simplest designs. Ben Cohen once said that he thought that between 20 and 30 per cent of sales were influenced by their ethical approach to business, but that would count for nothing if they didn’t make great ice cream.
Whether a business believes in influencing its customer base or not, it is a fact that
Chouinard has never appeared to loose his faith in the ability of the individual to make a difference. It is this faith that continues to encourage him to bring his message to his customers and anyone else that will listen, regardless of how insufferable he may appear to others. It is his contention that ‘ somewhere along the line individuals caused this whole mess, and it is up to us to fix it ’.