Achievements
Yvon Chouinard has proven that it is possible to make successful multi-million business following strict environmental principles and values. Yvon Chouinard is a world-class mountaineer and surfer, environmentalist and outdoor industry businessman, noted for his clothing and gear company, Patagonia. He started his business eventually and built a $230 million company without taking it public. Under his leadership Patagonia became the first major retail company to switch all its cotton clothing over to organic, the first to make fleece from recycled soda-pop bottles, and the first to pledge 1 percent of its annual sales to grassroots environmental organizations. He is a writer, first on climbing issues and ethics, and more lately on mixing environmentalism and sound business practice in restraining the growth and on the concept of a “slow company”.
Career highlights
Yvon Chouinard was born in 1938 in Maine. His father was a French-Canadian blacksmith, a vocation Yvon would eventually take up himself. In the late 1950s, he and his family moved from Maine to Southern California.
An avid mountain climber, he spent most of his time on this passion. To save money, he decided to make his own climbing tools using his blacksmithing background. Soon friends had to have Ivon's chrome-molybdenum steel pitons. In addition he supported himself selling gear from the back of his car. Before he knew it he was in business.
In 1965, he went into partnership with Tom Frost, who was an aeronautical engineer as well as a climber. By 1970, Chouinard Equipment had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S.
At that time climbing had become more popular, but the use of hard-steel pitons was causing significant damage to the cracks of Yosemite. Fortunately, there was an alternative: aluminum chocks. Ivon introduced them in the first Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972, which was opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons. This led to appearance of a new style of climbing called "clean climbing". Within a few months the piton business had atrophied; chocks sold faster than they could be made.
On a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, Chouinard bought a regulation team rugby shirt to wear rock climbing. His climbing friends asked where they could get one. Soon he began ordering shirts from New Zealand and Argentina as well. It became a support to Chouinard’s marginally profitable hardware business. Selling more and more clothes, he needed to find a name for the clothing line. At that time he founded Patagonia company, and from the mid-1980s to 1990, its sales grew from $20 million to $100 million.
Recognizing that the financial success of the company provided the opportunity to also achieve personal goals, Chouinard committed the company to being an outstanding place to work, and to be an important resource for environmental activism. In 1984, Patagonia opened an on-site cafeteria offering "healthy, mostly vegetarian food", and started providing on-site child care. In 1986, Chouinard committed the company to "tithing" for environmental activism, committing 1% of sales or 10% of profits. The commitment included paying employees working on local environmental projects so they could commit their efforts full-time.
In the early 1990s, an environmental audit of Patagonia revealed that cotton was the worst product for the environment. In 1994, Chouinard committed the company to using all pesticide free (organically-grown) cotton, and this demand created the organic cotton industry in California.
Yvon Chouinard is the author of the books Climbing Ice (1982) and Let my people go surfing (2005).
Leadership experience
Yvon Chouinard had always thought of himself as a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier and a blacksmith, not a businessman. When he and his wife Melinda made the decision to stay in business, they faced a personal challenge. Is it possible to run a company that does much good and very little harm? Is it possible to make a profitable business without giving up personal principles and values?
Chouinard understood that he would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business. So he decided to make business on his own terms. In the late seventies he has been reading every business book he could find, searching for a philosophy that would work for his company. He was especially interested in books on Japanese and Scandinavian styles of management, because he wanted to find a role model for the company; the American way of doing business offered only one of many possible routes. “We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even barefoot” he remembers. “We needed to have flex time to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family”.
One of the hardest things for a business to do is to investigate the environmental effects of its most successful product and, if it's bad, change it or pull it off the shelves. But this is the way Patagonia goes. “We've found that every time we've elected to do the right thing, even when it costs twice as much, it's turned out to be more profitable,” Chouinard says.
In 1991 when the company faced the crisis, he took a dozen of his top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, they asked themselves why they were in business and what kind of business they wanted Patagonia to be. They talked about the values they had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company. So they came to the conclusion that uncontrolled growth put at risk the values that had made the company succeed so far.
While his managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, Chouinard began to lead week-long employee seminars that were called Philosophies. He took a busload to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gathered his people under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company his ways of making business, environmental ethics and values. “I realize now that what I was trying to do was to instill in my company, at a critical time, lessons that I had already learned as an individual – and as a climber, surfer, kayaker and fly fisherman,” Chouinard said. “I had always tried to live my life fairly simply and by 1991, knowing what I knew about the state of the environment, I had begun to eat lower on the food chain and reduce my consumption of material goods. Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to “have it all,” the sooner it will die”.
Yvon Chouinard built a company that has an open-book policy; financial details are available with all employees to promote full transparency. There are no private offices at headquarters; everyone works in open rooms with no doors or separations. There are no special parking places; the best spots are reserved for fuel-efficient cars, no matter who owns them. Managers try to lead by example.
“Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible”, Chouinard says. “It will never make a totally sustainable, nondamaging product. But it is committed to trying. We simply don't have any other choice. As the late environmentalist David Brower once put it, ‘There's no business to be done on a dead planet’.”
Background Links
Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing, 2005
Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia.com, 2005
Amanda Griscom Little, Don't Get Mad, Get Yvon, Grist, October 22, 2004
Roger Rosenblatt, Jackson Hole, Reaching the Top by Doing the Right Thing, Time, October 11, 1999
Susan Casey, Patagonia: Blueprint for green business, Fortune, May 29, 2007
