18-03-2025
- Business
- National Geographic
Yvon Chouinard on why he gave away Patagonia to save the planet
Yvon Chouinard laughs when he tries to remember the oldest piece of gear he owns. Perhaps it's a piton he forged in the late 1950s, after he taught himself blacksmithing and started Chouinard Equipment, Ltd.? Or maybe it's one of the rugged rugby shirts his next company, Patagonia, made for climbing? Possibly the 'fleece' jacket prototype Patagonia built using toilet-seat-cover fabric, which has since become an outdoors icon?
'Almost everything I have is old,' says Chouinard, 86, grinning. 'I use everything until it completely falls apart.' The Patagonia founder glances around the office of his Wyoming ranch—a pinewood house with a view of the Tetons that he and his friends built in 1976—then raises his hands to show that the sleeves of his faded plaid shirt are all in tatters. 'My whole life has been pretty simple, really. I'm not a consumer.'
This may sound surprising, even hypocritical, from the founder of a company with consistent annual sales of a billion dollars. But Chouinard has long insisted he did not start Patagonia to turn a profit. 'I have a living,' he told the New Yorker in 1977, 'and that's all I want out of it.' Nearly half a century later, in September 2022, he backed up that claim, stunning the business world by announcing he was giving away the three-billion-dollar company, with 2 percent of its shares going to a trust where profits could be used for social good and the other 98 percent to a newly created nonprofit, the Holdfast Collective, which uses the funds to advocate for environmental causes. 'Earth,' Chouinard wrote on Patagonia's website, 'is now our only shareholder.'
