The founder of environmentally correct
Patagonia wants his company to change the world

By Lori Hall Steele
      It's near dusk, and Yvon Chouinard has been fly-fishing for steelhead since daybreak.
      Quiet, focused and Zen-like, Chouinard drops his fly into the Manistee River's flat green water for another drift. And another.
      No one's caught a thing all day. No one will.
      "That's just steelhead fishing," says Chouinard, founder and president of Patagonia, the environment-revering outdoor gear company.
      And that's all Chouinard, whom Time magazine recently named Hero for the Planet, has to say about the silvery trout. Sometimes they bite; sometimes they don't. It's of little consequence.
      Still, he keeps casting into the vanishing afternoon.
      For him, it's about process: the motion of the wrist, a line unleashing, the integrity of each action. It's the same with mountain climbing. Same with business.
      At 61, the Maine native has climbed the world's great peaks, surfed the globe and built a multimillion-dollar business by believing, in true anti-Machiavellian fashion, that the means are the end. Just repeat those pure motions and the ends, whether summits or sales, will take care of themselves.
      It's idealistic for sure, but his approach to business has worked. Patagonia, of Ventura, Calif., evolved from Chouinard's blacksmith shop, where in the early 1970s he hammered out a sturdier, removable piton for rock climbing and sold it from the back of his car. Now the company's clothing and gear are sold at high-end stores and through catalogs.
      Chouinard visited Michigan for the first time recently to deliver a speech about why environmentalism makes for good business. The speech was to benefit the Michigan Land Use Institute in Benzonia. He also came to fish. Mostly, though, he came for a woodcock dinner prepared by his friend, writer Doug Stanton.
      The Free Press caught up with him at Stanton's home near Traverse City.

Can you characterize Patagonia's philosophy and how it's different from other multimillion-dollar businesses?
      Our mission statement really is to use business to change the world. It comes from me never wanting to be a businessman anyway. It's a privately held company, and we can basically do whatever we want with it. I'm not beholden to anyone, so we can take risks. I never wanted to have a large business. But I am an idealist, and I wanted to make the best outdoor clothing in the world. The absolute best.
      We're coming from a background of making mountain climbing equipment that was the best in the world. So we applied the same principles of industrial design to making clothing. When we were making climbing equipment, if something broke, it would ...probably kill you because you were using it. So I've always made stuff for myself. I don't own very many things, but the things I own I try to buy the absolute best and try to make them last as long as possible.

Business isn't traditionally viewed as a vehicle to change the world. How can it work?
      We try to be an example for other businesses to follow. For me, it's been very easy trying to make the best quality product. I've given talks in business schools, and they're all sitting there agonizing: "OK, I need the big idea." I tell them: "Look you don't need the big idea. Just take anything -- take any service, any product -- and just make it better."
      Everybody wants to eat a better tomato. No one wants to eat these things at Safeway. They're awful. They're not even tomatoes. People want to eat organically grown tomatoes. Organic agriculture is growing at 30 percent a year. These other farmers are starving to death. I mean, get with it. Not everybody wants to drink Budweiser anymore. These little microbreweries are doing fantastic.
      Everybody wants better quality. I don't care what business you're in. If you're pumping gas, go back to washing people's windows again, offering people service.
      I think that's where the holes are in American business. Don't compete head-on with someone, but find your own niche, which is that you're going to do it better than somebody else.

And that's going to change the world? Quality?
      I think so. It'll make consumers consume less.
      You buy a blender and it craps out in a year. You take it to somebody to get it fixed, and they say it's a lot cheaper to buy a new one. Nobody repairs anything. You buy a computer and throw it away in two years. It's a disposable society. It's much better to wait until you can afford to buy one of these big, giant 1-horsepower bar blenders that's going to last you the rest of your life.
      That's the responsible thing to do.
      As businesses, that's the type of products we should be making. We're in a society where people would rather own 10 cheap pairs of pants rather than two really good ones.

How important is the bottom line in business when you've got a social or environmental agenda?
      We can't accomplish any of the things we want to do without being a profitable company -- but we don't focus on the bottom line.
      If you ask me how much money I made last year or how much money we're going to make this year, I have no idea. I'm not trying to be coy. I have no idea.
      I'm only interested in the process. And right now, I know that everything is going well. We're doing things right, and I know there's going to be profit next year. I just don't focus on it.
      That comes about from being a mountain climber. Mountain climbing is not about summits; it's not about being goal-oriented. Mountain climbing is all about the process of climbing mountains. How you climb mountains is more important than getting to the top. It's like fly-fishing. If you really want to catch a fish, use a worm. A worm is an absolute killer.
      But it's not what fly-fishing is about. Fly fishing is about the way that you fish. How you catch the fish is more important than catching the fish.

Why is the process so important?
      You get out of something what you put in it. If you climb a mountain by having a guide pull you up and you've got Sherpas carrying your pack, you're compromising on the way up. And if you compromise all of this away, then you're not going to get much out of it.
      You get to the top, but the goal is not to get to the top. It's like Zen archery: You're involved in the process of shooting an arrow. You don't really care whether it goes in the bull's-eye or not. You just practice all the different individual moves for years and then finally you're shooting arrows right into the bull's-eye without thinking of the bull's-eye. For me, business is the same way.

Do companies in the late '90s have to be seen as being environmentally conscious to be successful?
      Not if you don't have a choice. No one buys gasoline from a particular gas company because they're more environmentally conscious. Gas is all the same.
      But what if there's a gas company out there that is actually doing everything it can to minimize the damage they do in producing the gas? And then at the gas pump, there on your receipt, it says: 'Thank you for your purchase -- 1 percent of your purchase will be given to creating open space and national parks.' Would you go out of your way to buy that gas? I would, and I think a lot of my friends would. But we don't have that choice right now.

Can you talk about Patagonia's decision to use organic cotton, how that came about?
      It came about through educating ourselves. We have an environmental assessment policy where we look at all our processes and we ask questions: Should we be making clothing out of rayon? What does it mean to make clothes out of rayon? What is rayon? It's made out of trees. Did you know that?
      We asked a question: What's the best fiber to make clothing out of? And we found out that the worst fiber to be making clothing out of is 100-percent pure cotton. It uses 25 percent of the world's pesticides, and it only occupies 3 percent of the world's farmland.
      In some areas of the world, they apply toxic chemicals as much as 25 times during the growing season to grow a crop of cotton.
      After I went through tours of these cotton-growing areas, I was in shock. It's like a wasteland out there. They have huge lakes from the runoff from these cotton fields, toxic soups, and they hire guys to sit around in lawn chairs with shotguns. Whenever waterfowl tries to land on the lakes, they shoot at them to scare them away. Because if they get in there, they have chicks with three legs and two beaks, and it's just awful.
      I just came back and I said: "Look, I just will not make clothing if I have to make it this way. I don't want to be in this business. It's like being in the land mine business and finally seeing the results of what land mines do. I don't care if it's about jobs or anything, I'm going to shut this place down."
      So in one year, we went from using industrially grown cotton to organically grown cotton, which was not easy. But we did have a choice because there were some organic farmers.

The transition wasn't easy?
      For one thing, if I want to make a shirt ...I could just call a shirt manufacturer or a fabric manufacturer and say, "Hey, give me 10,000 yards of shirting fabric." Now if I want to make something like this (grabbing his organic cotton shirt), I have to deal with the farmer. I have to order bales of cotton. I have to call them before the season's planting and tell them how many acres to plant and what type of cotton. It's an altogether different game.

Considering your environmental agenda, how do you measure the business' success?
      At the end of the year, I just look to see how much good we've done. I don't care how much money we've made. I mean I do care in that we have to be profitable. If we're not profitable, it means we're wasteful, we're inefficient, and I don't like that. I look to see how much good we've done.

Some of the causes Patagonia supports are considered pretty radical, like Earth First. Why choose those types of groups?
      Because those are the ones that won't get funded by other corporations. Other corporations will give money to the symphony. We like to give to mostly volunteer, hard-core activist organizations. They're the most effective. They produce the most for the least amount of money. And they're the ones that need the support the most.

Patagonia offers its employees some pretty unusual perks -- like flex time for surfing. How does the company benefit from that?
      People have a tremendous sense of responsibility. The Let My People Go Surfing policy is basically: "Look, if the surf comes up, you go surfing. You don't go next Tuesday at 2 o'clock. You go surfing and then you come back and get your work done." You may be there until 9 o'clock at night.
      I don't care when people work as long as the work gets done. So there is no 9-to-5 routine. Nobody takes advantage of it. Nobody.

Any predictions on trends in outdoor clothing and back country gear? Big sellers this Christmas or next year?
      I'm so out of it with the fashion world. We have a couple of stores in New York City. We have one in Soho, and we get all these supermodels coming in -- Cindy Crawfords and Claudia Schiffers. They all come in, and they all are buying our stuff. And then, all of a sudden, Vogue magazine sees them with one of our little vests on and they write about it and they call us.
      I say I have no idea these guys are wearing this stuff. I just make it and they buy it. It's not a contrived thing. We didn't advertise. They just come in and buy it. I don't know what the next trend is.

Any impressions of Michigan after half a day?
      This area is phenomenally beautiful, and it's going through the exact same thing that the whole rest of the country is going through.
      All the good places in the country are just being loved to death. Everybody wants to live here. As people move in, then McDonald's wants to move in and then Kmart wants to move in and then the small businesses get wiped out and they want premium clean businesses so the kids don't run off to Chicago to get a job. But then the price of land gets so high that they can't afford houses so they move away anyway. I see it everywhere.
      The key to all that is to base the decisions on quality. When I look at those old Victorians in Traverse City, they're so beautiful. Those people in those days thought: "Let's not just build a house. Let's build a great house." Then came the '50s and '60s, and you can see the result of that, the god-awful square stucco things. Somewhere someone said: "Let's forget aboui quality. Let's just build something cheap and dirty and fast."
      We've got to go back to making our decisions based on quality of life.
Published in the Detroit Free Press.