Collection: Patagonia Softies

Yvon Chouinard started in the late 1950s as a self-taught blacksmith, forging climbing pitons in a shed and selling them from the boot of his car at Californian crags. The workshop eventually grew into Patagonia and Chouinard into an entrepreneur who half-despised entrepreneurship his entire life. The company advised customers to repair rather than buy, and on Black Friday 2011 it took out a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring a photo of its own jacket with the headline Don’t Buy This Jacket — don’t buy this jacket if you don’t need it. It sounded like clever marketing, until Chouinard took a step in September 2022 that has no parallel in the corporate world. He gave the company away — a firm worth billions of dollars. Ownership was transferred to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which guards the company’s values and independence in perpetuity, and to the non-profit Holdfast Collective, to which all profits not reinvested in the business have since flowed. The money goes to fighting the climate crisis and protecting wild nature. Earth is now our only shareholder, the founder wrote at the time. The family received nothing; the planet received everything. The eighty-year-old mountaineer simply followed through on the logic the company had professed for half a century. Patagonia is not a clothing brand with a CSR programme. It is an environmental project that happens to sew very good jackets. And one that proved you can win at business by giving it away.