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

by Yvon Chouinard

Demand for my gear grew until I couldn’t keep up making it by hand, so I started using more sophisticated tools and dies and machinery. I went into partnership with Tom and Doreen Frost. Tom was an aeronautical engineer who had a keen sense of design and esthetics. Doreen handled the bookkeeping and business end of things. During the nine years that the Frosts and I were partners, we redesigned and improved just about every climbing tool, making each one stronger, lighter, simpler, and more functional. Quality control was always foremost in our minds, because if a tool failed, it could kill someone, and since we were our own best customers, there was a good chance it would be us! Our guiding principle of design stemmed from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French aviator: Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over drafts and blue-prints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally a...