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

by Yvon Chouinard

I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different;

Primary among the problematic corporate values are the primacy of expansion and short-term profit over such other considerations as quality, sustainability, environmental and human health, and successful communities.

All are equally important. They represent an “ecology” of values that must be emphasized in economic activity that can mitigate the environmental and social crisis of our times.

Concern over transitory fashion trends is specifically not a corporate value.

growth and expansion are values not basic to this corporation.

In our internal operations, top management will work as a group, and with maximum transparency. This includes an “open book” policy that enables employees easy access to decisions, within normal boundaries of personal privacy and “trade secrecy.”

We’d take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk.

True, I wanted to give money to environmental causes. But even more, I wanted to create in Patagonia a model other businesses could look to in their own searches for environmental stewardship and sustainability,

yarak, a falconry term meaning when your falcon is superalert, hungry, but not weak, and ready to hunt.

“Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

The answer is that our philosophies aren’t rules; they’re guidelines. They’re the keystones of our approach to any project, and although they are “set in stone,” their application to a situation isn’t. In every long-lasting business, the methods of conducting business may constantly change, but the values, the culture, and the philosophies remain constant.

The first precept of industrial design is that the function of an object should determine its design and materials.

Function must dictate form.

Is It Multifunctional?

All the more reason, when we consider the purchase of anything, to ask ourselves, both as producers and consumers: Is this purchase necessary?

Buy less; buy better. Make fewer styles; design better.

Because the overall durability of a product is only as good as its weakest element,

We also produce videos that show how you can do your own repairs. We want to make it easy for you to wear your product for as long as possible.

As individual consumers, the single best thing we can do for the planet is to keep our stuff in use longer.

These conditions create a society of product consumers, not owners.

Making a dent in our collective consumption footprint will require shared responsibility between companies that make things and customers who buy them—but

in extreme cases companies actively thwart repairs by inventing new kinds of proprietary screws and other nonsense. This should be considered unacceptable given the environmental crisis we face—but,

discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination runs amok.

People have too many choices these days.

Decision making fatigue

from time to time our own line gets too big; the differences between products become too small. When that happens, we know that Patagonia is not living up to its own philosophy.

Acme, on the other hand, is a global company because it knows the importance of tailoring its products to specific markets.

The most responsible way for a consumer and a good citizen to buy clothes is to buy used clothing.

A study by Dr. Thomas M. Power at the University of Montana states that only 10 to 15 percent of the money Americans spend on goods and services is necessary for survival.

Fashion is happening only now, and art is timeless.

An illustrator becomes an artist when he or she can convey the same emotion with fewer brushstrokes.

was to commission an independent assessment of the environmental impacts of the fibers most commonly used in clothes:

warfare.