Yvon has always been an outdoors person. He’s a surfer, climber, fly fisher and all his friends were too. He focused on “scratching his own (and his friend’s) itch.” A few years earlier, in 1968, several friends (including Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face) and I had taken a six-month road trip to the tip of South America, surfing the west coast of the Americas down to Lima, Peru, skiing volcanoes in Chile, and climbing 11,073-foot Fitz Roy, in Argentina's Patagonia. To most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-La—far off, interesting, not quite on the map. It seemed like just the right idea for our clothing. To reinforce the tie to the real Patagonia, in 1973 we created a logo with a stormy sky, jagged peaks based on the Fitz Roy skyline, and a blue Southern Ocean. Awareness and attentiveness to who you are (in this case who your company is) are foundational to operating in a way that’s sustainable and successful. I read Chouinard’s original book nearly a decade ago and was fortunate to get him to sign my treasured copy in 2013 when he was in Cleveland, Ohio, to receive the Inamori Ethics Prize, which honored his integrity as a business leader and lifetime commitment to corporate social responsibility.

Branding is telling people who we are. Promotion is selling people on our product. Our promotional efforts begin with the product. Patagonia’s philosophy revolved heavily around doing what they were good at, and doing it extremely well. Think about sustainability. It’s about the long-game, not the short game. It’s not only about what you are producing, but how you are producing it. You will always be able to reason yourself into undermining the values that might go against the grain.Cotton fields contribute millions of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. A conventional cotton field stinks; its chemicals burn the eyes and nauseate the stomach. Before harvesting in non-frost regions like California, cotton has to be sprayed by a crop duster with the defoliant Paraquat, about half of which hits the target. The rest settles over the neighbors’ fields and into our streams. By doing something “right” the first time, we don’t have to worry about expending more effort and energy down the line, for ourselves or the planet.

In the early 1970s, as an offshoot of Chouinard Equipment, came a clothing line. It’s this line that ultimately became what we now know to be Patagonia. Patagonia’s first official store opened in 1973, in Ventura, CA.From a series of Patagonia ads in 2004: “Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.”