Patagonia: Humble Beginnings to Planet Defender

Rick Ridgeway, vice president for public engagement at Patagonia, spoke of his company’s efforts to decrease its environmental impact while increasing its social impact. A variety of programs and policies designed with these goals in mind have led to Patagonia being called the “coolest company on the planet” by Fortune magazine. Ridgeway described Patagonia’s humble beginnings as a blacksmithing workshop making mountain climbing equipment. “[Founder] Yvon [Chouinard] also hired his friends, and they were referred to appreciatively, and today even reverentially, as ‘dirtbags,’” Ridgeway said. By the early Seventies when Chouinard began selling a few items of clothing, not much had changed. “The clothes were still designed by dirtbags and worn by dirtbags, and that became the founding culture of the company that we captured in the photographs that we ran in the first Patagonia catalogues. We really worked hard not to take ourselves too seriously, and we avoided hiring pro athletes,” Ridgeway said. “And we wanted to show that our gear was for women as much as it was for men, so we ran photographs of women that told the real story of what it is like to be a mom in a world where everything always doesn’t go perfectly.” This unconventional marketing strategy

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