The Adventurous Ambition of Yvon Chouinard

How the Founder of Patagonia Built One of the World's Most Influential Companies

Hey! Justin here, and welcome to Just Go Grind, a newsletter sharing the lessons, tactics, and stories of world-class founders!

🌴 The First Village Lane Retreat!

I’m working on the details of the first founder retreat for Village Lane and am so excited to get this rolling!

The details as of now:

  • August 23-25 in Santa Barbara, California

  • Will include outdoor activities, knowledge sharing, and time to destress

All attendees will be vetted, as I’m trying to curate a great group of ambitious founders who want to build long-term relationships with other founders, learn, and have a little fun.

Interested?

Fill out the form below.

Village Lane is a vetted community for startup founders, connecting ambitious early-stage startup founders who have at least $100k in ARR or $250k in funding.

👋 Community Update

Thanks to everyone who came to our coffee meetup in Santa Monica on Tuesday - was great meeting so many people in the LA startup ecosystem!

We also are partnering with Pitch and Run to host an easy 3-mile run every Thursday in Beverly Hills. We had a great crew of 10 come out this week!

More events added to the LA calendar below:

I’m also hosting an SF coffee meetup on Monday, July 1st and I’ll be in SF from June 28 - July 2.

We’ll have coffee and bagels available and already have 20+ people signed up.

It’ll be in the same location as an SF meetup I hosted last year, pictured below:

Want to sponsor these events and also get exposure in this newsletter? Fill out this form.

Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia

Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia

Yvon Chouinard is the trailblazing force behind one of the most iconic and environmentally conscious brands in the world—Patagonia.

From scaling sheer rock faces to transforming the business landscape, Chouinard’s adventurous ambition knows no bounds.

As a climber, craftsman, and eco-warrior, he has redefined what it means to be a corporate leader, turning Patagonia into a beacon of sustainability and innovation.

His book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, originally published in 2005, is a masterpiece. I read the 10th-anniversary edition from 2016 to write this deep dive.

Let’s get to it.

Early Days

Yvon Chouinard was born in Lisbon, Maine in 1938.

As a child, he wanted to be a fur trapper, and while he failed in this regard, his life has been forever influenced by the outdoors.

Early on, he got his first lesson in philanthropy, one that he’d continue to carry his entire life:

We auctioned off all our possessions, including the hand-built furniture my father had made, and one traumatic day the six of us piled into the family Chrysler and drove west.

Somewhere along Route 66 we stopped at an Indian hogan, and my mother took out the preserved corn she had put up for the trip and gave it all to a Hopi woman and her hungry children.

That incident was probably my first lesson in philanthropy.

Yvon Chouinard

It was a rough start in a new home for Yvon:

When we arrived in Burbank, we stayed with another French Canadian family, and I was put in a public school. I was the smallest kid in the class, I couldn't speak English, and I constantly had to defend myself because I had a "girl's name."

Yvon Chouinard

The language and cultural differences made him a loner.

High school wasn’t any better:

High school was the worst. I had pimples, I couldn't dance, and I had no interest in any of the subjects except for the shop classes. I had an "attitude" and was always in detention.

For being a troublemaker, I often had to write lines like "I will not.." five hundred or so times. As a budding entrepreneur I would take three pencils and line them up with sticks and rubber bands so I could do three lines at once.

Yvon Chouinard

But Yvon also used this time in his life to be creative, which ended up being very useful later on:

I learned at an early age that it's better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner. I found my games in the ocean, creeks, and hillsides surrounding Los Angeles.

Yvon Chouinard

This adventurous streak led him to repel down cliffs to find hawk and falcon nests after joining a falconry club as a fifteen-year-old.

He loved it:

We thought it was the greatest sport ever, and we kept practicing, improving, and innovating. We made our own leather-padded rappelling clothes so we could go faster and faster

Yvon Chouinard

By the next summer, Yvon was obsessively learning to climb, and showcasing the risk-taking many associate with entrepreneurship:

I eventually talked my way into joining two guys from Dartmouth who were planning a climb up Templeton's Crack on Symmetry Spire. This was after other climbers had turned me down for my lack of experience, so I didn't elaborate on my history.

This would be my first actual roped climb, but I just faked it and pushed ahead, even when they asked me to lead the most difficult pitch - a wet, slimy crack.

They handed me pitons and a hammer I had no idea how to use, but I figured it out and managed anyway.

After that trip I returned to the Tetons every summer to climb for three months. Looking back now on those early attempts at climbing, I sometimes think it's a miracle I survived.

Yvon Chouinard

Yvon graduated high school in 1956, attended community college for two years, and then worked for his brother’s private detective business.

They had quite the client to keep them busy:

The main client was Howard Hughes, and it was mostly hanky-panky-type stuff: keeping track of Hughes's innumerable young "starlets," guarding a yacht to keep it "germ-free," and keeping him well hidden so he couldn't be subpoenaed for a lawsuit over Trans World Airlines.

Yvon Chouinard

Wild.

During that time, in 1957, Yvon taught himself blacksmithing with a “a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs and hammers” so he could make his own climbing hardware.

Similar to the origins of other companies, Yvon was dissatisfied with the status quo, which at the time included European climbing gear that consisted of soft iron pitons that would break if you took them out of the rocks.

Yvon wanted pitons he could reuse so he’d climb and leave no trace in the mountains that he visited.

He also started doing what Patagonia would be known for decades later: creating the best products possible.

I made my first pitons from an old chrome-molybdenum steel blade from a harvester, and TM Herbert and I used them on early ascents of the Lost Arrow Chimney and the North Face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite.

These stiffer and stronger pitons were ideal for driving into the often incipient cracks in Yosemite and could be taken out and used over and over again.

I made these Lost Arrow pitons for myself and the few friends I climbed with; then friends of friends wanted some.

I could forge only two of my chrome-molybdenum steel pitons in an hour, and I started selling them for $1.50 each.

You could buy European pitons for twenty cents, but you had to have my new gear if you wanted to do the state-of-the-art climbs that we were doing.

Yvon Chouinard

His product line only grew from there.

I also wanted to make a stronger carabiner, so in 1957 I borrowed $825.35 from my parents to pay for a drop forging die. I drove to the Aluminum Company of America headquarters in Los Angeles. I was eighteen years old, had a full beard, Levi's, huarache sandals, and a fistful of cash right down to the thirty-five cents.

The people at ALCOA hardly knew how to process cash through their system, but they made my drop forging die.

My father helped me build a small shop out of an old chicken coop in our backyard in Burbank. Most of my tools were portable, so I would load up my car and travel up and down the California coast from Big Sur to San Diego.

I would surf, then haul my anvil down to the beach and cut out angle pitons with a cold chisel and hammer before moving on to another surfing beach. I found gas money by diving into trash cans and redeeming soda pop bottles.

Yvon Chouinard

Yvon sold equipment out of the back of his car, equipment he worked on during the winter months, and spent the rest of the months outdoors, living a very frugal life:

Before leaving for the Rockies one summer, my friend Ken Weeks and I bought a couple of cases of dented cat food cans from a damaged can outlet in San Francisco.

We supplemented the cat food with oatmeal, potatoes, ground squirrel, blue grouse, and porcupines assassinated à la Trotsky with an ice ax. I slept two hundred days a year or more in my old army-surplus sleeping bag.

Yvon Chouinard

LOL.

In 1962, after being arrested and spending eighteen days in jail for riding a freight train and “wandering around aimlessly with no apparent means of support” Yvon gives us a glimpse into the psyche of a future founder:

By the time we got out, we had each lost twenty pounds on the jailhouse diet of Wonder Bread, beans, and oatmeal.

We had only fifteen cents between us, it was snowing, and the cops gave us a half hour to get out of town.

Yet we never entertained the thought of calling our parents or friends for help. Climbing had taught us to be self-reliant; there were no rescue teams in those days.

Yvon Chouinard

Self-reliance. No rescue teams.

Sounds a bit like entrepreneurship, doesn’t it?

After being drafted into the army shortly after, getting married, serving in Korea, and coming home to “a failed marriage” in 1964, Yvon went back to what he knew - making climbing gear.

Chouinard Equipment

Yvon started in Burbank, created a catalog with the items he was making, hired a few climbing friends to help him, and in 1965, teaming up with Tom and Doreen Frost, Yvon worked to create the best equipment possible, for good reason:

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!

Yvon Chouinard

By 1966 the company had moved from Burbank to Ventura to be close to prime surfing locations.

Demand for Chouinard Equipment’s products continued to climb.

It’s easy to see why:

Ours stood out because they had the cleanest lines. They were also the lightest, strongest, and most versatile tools in use.

Where other designers would work to improve a tool's performance by adding on, Tom Frost and I would achieve the same ends by taking away - reducing weight and bulk without sacrificing strength or the level of protection.

Yvon Chouinard

Yvon soon opened a retail store and, as you might expect, it wasn’t exactly anything special:

Our first retail store was another ugly tin shed, and it was Roger's idea to swipe some old wooden fencing from a nearby ranch, combine it with some wood from the crates that our imported ropes came in, and decorate the inside of the store with the old wood.

Yvon Chouinard

And their expectations for the business in 1968?

Low, to say the least:

Since there wasn't much profit at the end of the year, we paid ourselves by the hours worked.

None of us saw the business as an end in itself. It was just a way to pay the bills so we could go off on climbing trips.

Yvon Chouinard

However, the business just kept growing and it became the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. by 1970.

But this came at an environmental cost.

Not long after, Yvon made a critical decision that would shape his company, and the world more broadly, for decades to come.

Starting Patagonia

What do you do when the products you’re selling harm the environment you made them for in the first place?

If you’re Yvon Chouinard, you pivot, phasing out one product for another:

The repeated hammering of hard steel pitons, during both placement and removal in the same fragile cracks, was severely disfiguring the rock.

After an ascent of the Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, I came home disgusted with the degradation I had seen.

Frost and I decided we would phase out of the piton business. This was to be the first big environmental step we were to take over the years. Pitons were the mainstay of our business, but we were destroying the very rocks we loved.

Fortunately, there was an alternative to pitons: aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather than hammered in and out of cracks. British climbers had been using them on their crags, but because they were crude, they were little known and less trusted in the rest of Europe and the States.

We designed our own versions, called Stoppers and Hexentrics, and sold them in small quantities until the appearance of the first Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972.

Yvon Chouinard

I love that by reimagining a product, aluminum chocks, and creating his own version, Yvon was able to do away with a damaging product (pitons).

Of course, if Stoppers and Hexentrics were little known in the U.S., Yvon would be in the same situation.

The catalog he mentioned ensured that wouldn’t be the case.

Leveraging storytelling, the catalog told of the environmental hazards of pitons and featured a fourteen-page essay from a climber, Doug Robinson, on how to use chocks, in what was referred to as clean climbing.

Soon, Yvon also had his first idea for clothing, using superheavy corduroy cloth to create durable pants and shorts for climbing.

Then came the idea that took off:

Then, on a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, I bought myself a regulation team rugby shirt to wear, thinking it would make a great shirt for rock climbing.

Overbuilt to withstand the rigors of rugby, it had a collar that would keep the hardware slings from cutting into my neck.

The basic color was blue, with two red and one yellow center stripe across the chest.

Back in the States I wore it around climbing, and all my friends asked where they could get one. We ordered a few shirts from Umbro, in England, and they sold straight off. We couldn't keep them in stock.

Soon we began ordering shirts from New Zealand and Argentina as well. I began to see clothing as a way to help support the marginally profitable hardware business.

At the time we had about 75 percent of the climbing hardware market, but we still weren't making much of a profit.

Yvon Chouinard

I just love the progression of Yvon’s company.

He lives for outdoor activities, is a customer of his products, and is always on the lookout for something better.

Everything comes from a functional need and he pays attention to what already exists in the world.

The product ideas kept coming, all serving different needs.

This is how Patagonia was born:

As we began to make more and more clothes (wool Chamonix guide sweaters, classic Mediterranean sailor shirts, canvas pants and shirts, and a technical line of rainwear— a predecessor to Gore-Tex — called Foamback, we needed to find a name for our clothing line.

Chouinard was suggested at first. We already had a good image; why start from scratch?

We had two reasons against it.

First, we didn't want to dilute the image of Chouinard Equipment as a tool company by making clothing under that label.

Second, we didn't want our clothes to be associated only with mountain climbing; we had a vision of a greater future than that.

The name Patagonia soon came up in our discussions. To most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-La-far-off, interesting, not quite on the map.

Patagonia brings to mind, as we once wrote in a catalog introduction, "romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors."

Our intent was to make clothing for those rugged southern Andes/Cape Horn conditions. It's been a good name for us, and it can be pronounced in every language.

Yvon Chouinard

So they named the company Patagonia and everything took off from there, right?

Not exactly.

In 1974, we made our big move and contracted directly with a garment factory in Hong Kong for three thousand shirts a month, in eight color combinations.

It turned into a disaster.

Shipments were late, and because the factory was accustomed to making trendy fashion clothing, the quality was terrible. They used too fine a thread, the shirts shrank horribly, and some even came in with three-quarter-length sleeves.

We unloaded as many shirts as we could for less than cost and almost lost the company. Because we had been growing so quickly and were still not very profitable, we had severe cash-flow problems.

Yvon Chouinard

Then, in 1975, Yvon parted ways with his business partners, the Frosts, after their relationship had “strained to the breaking point.”

Four years later, in what Yvon calls his “Management By Absence” management style, he handed over the reins to Kris McDivitt, who ended up being the general manager and CEO for 13 years.

Here’s how Kris described it:

There were only five of us in the company in 1972. In 1977, there were sixteen of us and my brother was general manager. In 1979, my brother quit and Yvon didn't want to run the company—he wanted to climb and surf and all those things.

So he gave me the companies, saying in effect, "Here's Patagonia. Here's Chouinard Equipment. Do with them what you will. I'm going climbing."

I had no business experience so I started asking people for free advice. I just called up presidents of banks and said, "I've been given these companies to run and I've no idea what I'm doing. I think someone should help me."

And they did.

If you just ask people for help—if you just admit that you don't know something—they will fall all over themselves trying to help. 

So, from there I began building the company. I was really the translator for Yvon's vision and aims for the company.

Kris McDivitt

This was part of Yvon doing business his way.

He didn’t want to play by the rules, so he created his own.

The Juvenile Delinquent

What was Yvon’s way of doing business?

Uniquely his own:

After we had pondered our responsibilities and financial liabilities, one day it dawned on me that I was a businessman and would probably be one for a long time.

It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious.

I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business; I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. 

If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.

One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is: If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, "This sucks. I'm going to do my own thing."

Since I had never wanted to be a businessman, I needed a few good reasons to be one.

One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious: Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot.

Yvon Chouinard

He also did his homework.

Over the next few years I read every book on business, searching for a philosophy that would work for us. I was especially interested in books on Japanese or Scandinavian styles of management because I knew the American way of doing business offered only one of many possible routes.

I didn't find any American company we could use as a role model. Either it was too large and conservative for us to relate to or it didn't have the same values.

However, there was one company, Esprit, owned by my friends Doug and Susie Tompkins (his first wife), that was contrary and that shared our values.

Yvon Chouinard

With a focus on multifunctional technical clothing after riding out the cash-flow crisis they were in, Yvon and the team continued to develop new product after new product, including moisture-wicking underwear.

They also continued to educate their customers:

Using the capabilities of this new underwear as the basis of a system, we became the first company to teach the outdoor community, through essays in our catalog, the concept of layering.

This approach involves wearing an inner layer against the skin for moisture transport, a middle layer of pile for insulation, and then an outer shell layer for wind and moisture protection.

Our teaching paid off. Before long we saw much less cotton and wool in the mountains-and a lot of pilled powder blue and tan pile sweaters worn over striped polypropylene underwear.

Yvon Chouinard

Once again showing the power of media to influence purchasing decisions.

Another important decision was made in how Patagonia operated:

Improving pile was a gradual process. We worked closely with Malden to develop first a soft bunting fabric, an imitation wool that pilled less, and eventually Synchilla, an even softer double-faced fabric that did not pill at all.

With Synchilla, we learned an important lesson in business. While Malden Mills' easier access to financial capital made many of the innovations possible, the fabric would never have been developed if we had not actively shaped the research and development process.

From that point forward, we began to make significant investments in our own research and design departments. Our fabric lab and our fabric development departments, in particular, became the envy of the industry. Mills were eager to work with us on developing projects, because they knew that if Patagonia helped them, the developed fabric would likely be a better one.

Yvon Chouinard

In the early 1980s, Patagonia introduced another change to their products: Color.

At a time when all outdoor products were tan, forest green, or, at the most colorful, rust, we drenched the Patagonia line in vivid color.

We introduced cobalt, teal, French red, mango, seafoam, and iced mocha. Patagonia clothing, still rugged, moved beyond bland-looking to blasphemous. And it worked. The rest of the industry spent the better part of a decade catching up.

Yvon Chouinard

With bold colors and innovative fabrics, Patagonia’s popularity grew well beyond its core outdoor community.

Growing Pains

By 1990, Patagonia’s sales had ballooned to $100 million, up from $20 million in the mid-1980s.

This came when they opened their first retail store in France in 1987, Tokyo in 1989, and two stores per year domestically.

But the rapid growth wouldn’t last.

I was still wondering why I was really in business when, in 1991, after all those years of 30 to 50 percent compound annual growth and trying to have it all, Patagonia hit the wall. The country had entered a recession, and the growth we had always planned on, and bought inventory for, stopped. Our sales crunch came not from a decline from the previous year but from a mere 20 percent increase!

Nevertheless, the 20 percent shortfall nearly did us in. Dealers canceled orders, and inventory began to build. Neither the mail order nor the international division could meet its forecasts, and both returned inventory as well. We cut back production as much as we could for spring and fall. We froze hiring and nonessential travel. We dropped new products and discontinued marginal sellers.

The crisis soon deepened. Our primary lender, Security Pacific Bank, was itself in financial trouble, and it sharply reduced our credit line-twice within several months. To bring our borrowing within the new limits, we had to reduce spending drastically. We made plans to shut down our offices and sales showrooms in London, Vancouver, and Munich. We let go our CEO and CFO and returned Kris McDivitt as our CEO.

Yvon Chouinard

As a result of the recession, on July 31, 1991, Patagonia let go of 120 employees, 20% of their workforce.

Yvon described it as, “The single darkest day of the company’s history.

But it also presented Yvon with an opportunity to hit the reset button.

He took a dozen of his top managers to the real Patagonia to discuss the type of business they wanted Patagonia to be and the values they wanted to embody.

Changes came quickly:

Turnaround, in 1991, was fairly swift. Overnight we became a much more focused and sober-minded company, which limited our growth to a sustainable-rate, spent carefully, and managed thoughtfully.

Within three years we eliminated several layers of management, consolidated inventories into a single system, and brought the sales channels under central control.

Having the philosophies in writing— as well as the shared cultural experience of the classes— played a critical role in the turnaround.

I've heard that smart investors and bankers don't trust a growing company until it has proved itself by how it survives its first big crisis. If that's true, then we've been there.

Yvon Chouinard

Then, starting in 1994, they took even greater steps towards taking responsibility for their environmental impact:

In 1994, we produced our first internal environmental assessment report where we started questioning what impact we were really having by making our clothes.

In 1993, we were the first to start making our Synchilla fleece jackets using fiber made from recycled soda pop bottles. By spring of 1996 all our cotton styles were made of organically grown cotton.

From 1994 to today, the major effort at Patagonia has been to clean up our supply chain including the use of organic natural fibers and recycled synthetics, less toxic dyes and chemicals, better labor practices, and, finally, taking responsibility for our product from birth to rebirth.

Yvon Chouinard

They were just getting started.

Patagonia’s Impact

To mention all of the ways Patagonia has contributed to positively impacting the planet would take too many words for the scope of this deep dive. I highly suggest reading the book for more on their story.

That said, here’s a passage from the book that showcases their commitment:

Then Mark Capelli, a young graduate student, gave a slide show of photos he had taken along the river—of the birds that lived in the willows, of the muskrats and water snakes, of eels that spawned in the estuary. When he showed a slide of a steelhead smolt, everyone stood up and cheered. Yes, several dozen steelhead still came to spawn in our "dead" river.

The development plan was defeated. We gave Mark office space, a mail-box, and small contributions to help him fight the battle for the river. As more development plans cropped up, the Friends of the Ventura River worked to defeat them and to clean up the water and to increase its flow. We lobbied for a second stage on the sewer plant and then a third. Wildlife increased, and a few more steelhead began to spawn.

Mark taught us two important lessons: A grassroots effort could make a difference, and degraded habitat could, with effort, be restored.

Inspired by his work, we began to make regular donations to small groups working to save or restore natural habitat, rather than give the money to large NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) with big staffs, overheads, and corporate connections.

In 1986, we committed ourselves to donate 10 percent of profits each year to these groups. We later upped the ante to 1 percent of sales, or 10 percent of pretax profits, whichever was greater. We have kept that commitment every year, boom or bust. 

In 1988, we initiated our first national environmental campaign, supporting an alternative master plan to deurbanize the Yosemite Valley. We solicited essays from writers and then printed them in the catalog and devoted display space in our stores.

Yvon Chouinard

In 2001, they started 1% For The Planet, which is a global network that now has thousands of businesses and environmental organizations working together to support people and the planet.

More than $635 million has been given so far.

The big splash from Patagonia came in September 2022 when Yvon announced he was donating ownership control in Patagonia to the newly created Patagonia Purpose Trust, and future profits to a nonprofit called Holdfast Collective.

Why?

So profits would be used to address climate change and save the planet.

It was a bold move, to say the least, but not surprising given Yvon’s history.

It’s clear just how much he cares about the planet and this was one of many admirable actions he’s taken to do something about it.

Yvon’s Wisdom & Philosophies

In each edition of the Just Go Grind newsletter, I like to include a few more quotes at the end from my research into the founder who is featured, sharing their wisdom.

On maintaining a sense of urgency:

Maintaining a sense of urgency throughout a company is one of the most difficult challenges in business. The problem is further compounded by having to depend on outside suppliers who may not have the same sense of expediency.

I constantly hear people giving lame excuses for why something is impossible or why a job didn't get done on time. Here are a few examples:

"I wish I could help you but.." How many times have you heard service persons say those words when you know they don't mean it and are just being lazy? "I wish I could give you a baked potato instead of rice, but we have a no-substitution policy here." Or, "I wish we could do it, but our insurance policy won't allow it." Why not just do it anyway? Or get another insurance policy or don't even have insurance? Get out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat.

"We can't get any more fabric (or aluminum or, whatever)." Substitute another material; try another mill or fifty or a hundred mills. Try mills in other countries; call a competitor and find out where it gets its fabric.

"I've called and called, but I can't get through." How many times have you really called? Three or four times? Call twenty times. Or try an e-mail or a registered letter, or catch him at home with a 5:00 a.m. wake-up call.

"The computer screwed up." At least people didn't have this one fifty years ago! Computers don't screw up; people screw up. Garbage in, garbage out. "All the computer terminals are tied up." This may be true, but maybe the job could have been done on a typewriter or with a yellow no. 2 Eberhard Faber.

"Ididn't have the time" or "I've been too busy" to answer your letter, to return your call, to write a weekly report, to clean my desk, whatever. These are dishonest excuses. What the person really means is that the job didn't get done because it had the lowest priority, and in fact he may never return your call because he really doesn't want to. People do what they want to do.

Lastly, "Impossible." The lamest of the lame excuses! Difficult maybe, or impractical, or too expensive, but rarely is anything impossible.

Yvon Chouinard

On organic growth and thriving during recessions:

We have controlled our growth to what we call organic growth. We don't force our growth by stepping out of the specialty outdoor market and trying to be who we aren't.

We let our customers tell us how much we should grow each year. Some years it could be 5 percent growth or 25 percent, which happened during the middle of the Great Recession.

Consumers become very conservative during recessions. They stop buying fashionable silly things. They will pay more for a product that is practical, multifunctional, and will last a long time. We thrive during recessions.

Yvon Chouinard

On taking action:

Our more conservative employees wanted us to phase in the new material slowly, especially because we were introducing Synchilla at the same time. Together polypropylene and bunting fleece represented 70 percent of our sales. Yet you can't wait until you have all the answers before you act. It's often a greater risk to phase in products because you lose the advantage of being first with a new idea.

I had faith that the product was good, and I knew the market, so we forged ahead to shift our entire line of polypropylene underwear to the new Capilene polyester.

Our loyal core customers quickly realized the advantages of Capilene and Synchilla, and our sales soared. Other companies, just introducing rip-offs of our bunting and polypropylene clothes, had to scramble to keep up.

Yvon Chouinard

On using stress to grow:

Just as doing risk sports will create stresses that lead to a bettering of one's self, so should a company constantly stress itself in order to grow.

Our company has always done its best work whenever we've had a crisis. I've never been so proud of our employees as in 1994, when the entire company was mobilized to change over from using traditional cotton to organically grown by 1996. It was a crisis that led to writing down our philosophies.

When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.

Yvon Chouinard

On being true to yourself:

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

On fighting complacency:

When I look at my business today, I realize one of the biggest challenges I have is combating complacency.

I always say we're running Patagonia as if it's going to be here a hundred years from now, but that doesn't mean we have a hundred years to get there!

Our success and longevity lie in our ability to change quickly. Continuous change and innovation require maintaining a sense of urgency—a tall order, especially in Patagonia's seemingly laid-back corporate culture.

In fact, one of the biggest mandates I have for managers at the company is to instigate change. It's the only way we're going to survive in the long run.

Yvon Chouinard

Recent Founder Deep Dives

Thanks for reading!

Best,

Justin

P.S. Interested in sponsoring Just Go Grind and reaching 21,000+ founders, investors, and operators?

P.P.S. Want to work with me 1 on 1?

P.P.P.S. Hiring? Check out the team at Athyna.

What did you think of today's newsletter?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Reply

or to participate.