Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

by Yvon Chouinard

What’s the antidote? Making a dent in our collective consumption footprint will require shared responsibility between companies that make things and customers who buy them—but businesses must act independently. At Patagonia, we work hard to make high-quality, responsibly sourced clothing that lasts for years and can be repaired—and we guarantee it for life. Our Reno repair facility did more than 40,000 individual repairs in 2015, and we’ve trained our retail staff to handle the simple repair jobs (which total thousands more). We have partnered with iFixit to publish more than forty free repair guides for Patagonia products on our website. We go to great lengths to provide our customers with opportunities to fix their gear themselves, find it a new home, or recycle it if necessary. We ask our customers to use tools we provide to decrease the environmental impact of their stuff over time by buying only what they need, repairing what they have, finding ways to reuse items, and recycling when it’s truly time. But this is far from a trend. While some companies like Ricoh, DeWalt, Caterpillar, and Lenovo have made repair and remanufacturing a staple of their business model, most companies still make cheap stuff that breaks and must be replaced. Customers conditioned to seeking out the best price buy into this model and keep the cycle going. And too often, products come without repair instructions—and in extreme cases companies actively thwart repairs by inventing new kinds of pr...

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