Patagonia History

History of the clothing brand Patagonia

10 april 2018

Yvon Chouinard, founder of the Patagonia clothing store, began his career as a climber in 1953 as a 14-year member of the Falconry Club of Southern California, which trained hawks and falcons to hunt. After one of the adult leaders, Don Prentice, taught the boys how to rappel down the hawk cliffs, Yvon and his friends became so keen on the sport that freight trains began to jump to the western end of the Valley of San Fernando, to the sandstone cliffs of Stoney Point. There, eventually, they learned to climb and rappel down the rock.

Chouinard started hanging out at Stoney Point every weekend in winter and at Tahquitz Rock, in Palm Springs, in the fall and spring. There he met other young climbers who belonged to the Sierra Club, including TM Herbert, Royal Robbins and Tom Frost. Eventually, the friends moved from Tahquitz to Yosemite, to teach themselves how to climb their great walls.

The only pythons available at that time were sweet iron, they were placed once and then left on the rock. But in Yosemite, multi-day promotions required hundreds of locations. Chouinard, after meeting John Salathé, a Swiss mountaineer and a mystic Swedenborg who had once made iron pins from the axes of Model A, decided to make his own reusable hardware. In 1957, he went to a scrap yard and bought a used coal forge, a 138-pound anvil, some tongs and hammers, and began to learn how to blacksmith.

Chouinard made his first pythons from an old blade and tested them with T.M. Herbert in the first climbs of Lost Arrow Chimney and North Face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite. The word spread and soon friends had to have chrome steel molybdenum pythons from Chouinard. Before I knew it, I was in the business. He could forge two of them in an hour, and sold them for $ 1.50 each.

Chouinard built a small store in his parents' backyard in Burbank. Most of his tools were portable, so he could load his car and travel the California coast from Big Sur to San Diego, surfing. After a session, he would drag his anvil to the beach and cut the pythons with a cold chisel and a hammer before continuing.

Over the next several years, Chouinard faked pythons during the winter months, passed from April to July on the walls of Yosemite, then headed out of the summer heat toward the high mountains of Wyoming, Canada or the Alps, and then back to Yosemite in the fall until the snow fell in November. He kept selling equipment from the back of his car. The gains were slim, however. For weeks, I would live from fifty cents to a dollar a day. Before going to the Rockies one summer, he bought two boxes of canned and canned tuna cat in a damaged tin store in San Francisco. This food supply was supplemented with oats, potatoes and squirrels and poached porcupines.

In Yosemite, Chouinard and his friends were called the Cong Valley. They had to hide from the park rangers in the boulders on Camp 4 after they stayed more than 2 weeks of camp limit. They prided themselves on the fact that rock climbing and icefalls had no economic value, that they were rebellious. His heroes were Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, Gaston Rebuffat, Richard Cassin and Herman Buhl.

Chouinard team
Soon there was enough demand for Chouinard's team that he could not keep doing it by hand; He had to start using tools, dies and machinery. Therefore, in 1965, he teamed up with Tom Frost, an aeronautical engineer and climber, with a great sense of design and aesthetics. During the nine years that Frost and Chouinard were partners, they redesigned and improved almost all the climbing tools, to make them stronger, lighter, simpler and more functional. They would return from each trip to the mountains with new ideas to improve existing tools.

Its guiding design principle came from Antoine de Saint Exupéry, the French aviator:

Have you ever thought, not only about the plane but about any man, that all the industrial efforts of man, all his calculations and calculations, all the nights spent working on drafts and plans, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose only and principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there is a natural law that states that to achieve this end, refine the curve of a piece of furniture, the keel of a ship or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually participating in the elemental purity of the curve of the chest or human shoulder , there must be experimentation of several generations of artisans. In any thing, perfection is finally reached not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to be taken away, when a body has been reduced to its nakedness. *
In 1970, Chouinard Equipment had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States. He had also become a villain of the environment because his team was damaging the rock. The climb had become more popular, but it remained concentrated on the same well-tested routes in areas such as El Dorado Canyon, Shawangunks and Yosemite Valley. The same fragile cracks had to withstand the repeated hammering of the pythons, during placement and removal, and the disfigurement was severe. After an ascent of the degraded Nose route at El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers before, Chouinard and Frost decided to gradually abandon the python business. This would be the first major environmental step we would take over the years. It was a big commercial risk, the pythons were still the pillar of the business, but it had to be done.

Fortunately, there was an alternative: aluminum shims that could be wedged by hand instead of sticking in and out of cracks. We presented them in the first catalog of Chouinard Equipment in 1972.

The catalog was opened with an editorial by the owners about the environmental dangers of the pythons. A 14-page essay by Sierra Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph:

There is a word for that, and the word is clean. Climbing with just nuts and runners for protection is to climb clean. Clean because the climber who passes does not let alter the rock. Clean because nothing gets stuck in the rock and then it hits out, leaving the rock marked and the experience of the next climber is less natural. Clean because the protection of the climber leaves little trace of his ascension. Clean is to climb the rock without changing it; One step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.
A few months after the catalog was shipped, the python business had atrophied; the socks sold faster than they could be made. In the tin buildings of Chouinard Equipment, the hammer's steady rhythm gave way to the sharp, high-pitched buzz of the multi-hole drill.

Clothing for climbers and fishermen

During the last years of the sixties, men did not wear bright clothes and Patagonia hats did not exist or anything like that. The "active sportswear" consisted of basic gray sweats and pants, and the standard theme for climbing in Yosemite were dark brown trousers and white dress shirts bought at the thrift store. On a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, Chouinard bought a rugby shirt from the regulation team to use rock climbing. Built to withstand the rigors of rugby, it had a collar that would prevent hardware slings from being cut at the neck. It was blue, with two red central stripes and a yellow one on the chest. Back in the United States, Chouinard put it around his climbing friends, who asked him where they could get one.

Patagonia ordered some Umbro t-shirts in England, and they were sold directly. We could not keep them in inventory, and soon we started ordering shirts from New Zealand and Argentina as well. Other companies did the same and we soon realized that we had introduced a less fashionable fashion in the United States. We started to see clothes as a way to help the marginally profitable hardware business, and in 1972 we sold polyurethane rain capes and bivouac sacks from Scotland, gloves and mittens from Austrian boiled wool and reversible "schizo" hand-woven hats from Boulder

As we began to make more and more clothes, we needed to find a name for our clothing line. Why not "Chouinard"? We already had a good image, why start from scratch? We have two reasons against that. First of all, we did not want to dilute Chouinard's image as a tool company by making clothes under that label. And second, we did not want our clothes to be associated only with mountaineering.

For most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-La, distant, interesting, not quite on the map. Patagonia brings to mind, as we wrote in an introduction to the catalog, "romantic visions of glaciers falling in fjords, windswept peaks, gauchos and condors." It has been a good name for us, and it can be pronounced in all languages.

Capilene® and Synchilla®: a history of layers

At a time when the entire mountaineering community depended on the traditional layers of cotton, wool and down that absorbed moisture, we sought inspiration and protection elsewhere. We decided that a basic element of North Atlantic fishermen, the synthetic hair down sweater jackets, would be an ideal mountain layer, as it would isolate well without absorbing moisture.

But we needed to find some fabric to prove our idea, and it was not easy to find. Finally, Malinda Chouinard, acting on intuition, drove to Merchandise Mart in Los Angeles. He found what he was looking for in Malden Mills, fresh out of bankruptcy after the collapse of the fake fur market. We sew samples and test them in the field in alpine conditions. It had a couple of drawbacks: a bulky and heavy fit and a bad day look, thanks to the fast stacking fibers. But it was surprisingly warm, especially when used with a shell. It was isolated when wet, but also dried in minutes, and reduced the number of layers a climber had to use.

It is not good to use a quick-drying insulation layer on cotton underwear, which absorbs moisture from the body and then freezes. In 1980, we came out with a long insulating underwear made of polypropylene, a synthetic fiber that has a very low specific gravity and does not absorb water. It has been used in the manufacture of industrial products as marine ropes, which float. Her first adaptation to clothing was like a non-woven liner in disposable diapers.

Using the capabilities of this new underwear as the basis of a system, we became the first company to teach, through trials in our catalog, the concept of layers for the outdoor community. This approach involves the use of an inner layer against the skin to transport moisture, an intermediate layer of hair for insulation, and then an outer layer layer for protection against wind and moisture.

It did not take many seasons before we saw much less cotton and wool in the mountains, and a lot of sweaters with blue pillows and cinnamon badly pilled on striped polypropylene underwear.

Polypropylene, like the pile, had some problems. It had a very low melting temperature, and customers were melting their underwear in commercial dryers, which run hotter than household dryers. In addition, polypropylene is hydrophobic and repels water, making it difficult to clean completely; retained odors And its absorption properties were not inherent to the fabric, but a product of oils applied in the process of spinning and weaving that, after twenty more or less washings, would wear out

Even though pile and polypropylene were immediately successful, and we still did not have significant competition, we worked hard from the beginning to improve our quality and overcome the problems of both fabrics.

Improving the stack was a gradual process. We worked closely with Malden to first develop a softer Bunting fabric, a boiled synthetic yarn that perishes less, and finally Synchilla®, a double-sided cloth that is even softer than no pellet at all. With Synchilla, we learned an important business lesson. While Malden's access to capital made many of the innovations possible, the fabric would never have developed if we had not actively formed the research and development process. From that moment, we began to make important investments in research and design. Our tissue lab and our fabric development department, in particular, became the envy of the industry. Mills was eager to work with us in the development of projects; They knew that if Patagonia drove them or helped them, the developed fabric would probably be better.

But our replacement for polypropylene did not come from a process of mutual development with a mill; He came out of nowhere.

In 1984, while walking through the Sporting Goods show in Chicago, Chouinard saw a demonstration of polyester soccer jerseys that were cleaned of grass stains. Polyester, like polypropylene, is made of molten plastic resins extruded through a die to create a thin, threadlike fiber. These plastic fibers are very soft; The clothing woven from them is difficult to clean because the slippery fibers repel soap and water from normal washing.

Milliken, the company that made soccer jerseys, had developed a process that permanently etched the surface of the fiber when it was extruded, so that the surface became hydrophilic, water-loving. It lost moisture to the outside and the treatment was permanent. Chouinard saw the fabric as perfect for underwear. And the polyester had a much higher melting temperature than Polypro, so it would not melt in a commercial dryer.

In the fall of 1985 we changed our entire line of polypropylene underwear with the new Capilene® polyester. It was a big risk, similar to our introduction of chocks in 1972. During the same season we also presented the new Synchilla fleece: among them, the oldest products made of polypropylene and bunting accounted for 70% of our sales. But our loyal core customers quickly realized the advantages of Capilene and Synchilla, and sales skyrocketed.

Increase
During the 1980s, we made another important change. At a time when all outdoor products were tan, forest green or, in the most colorful, light blue, we soaked the Patagonia line in bright colors. We present cobalt, bluish green, French red, aloe, marine foam and frozen mocha. The clothes of Patagonia, still scabrous, moved beyond the bland to the blasphemous.

The uncontrolled popularity of dramatic colors and the growing appeal of technical fabrics such as Synchilla created a new concern. The Patagonia label had become as much a fashion as the rugby shirt, and our popularity extended well beyond the outdoor community for fashion consumers. Although we spent most of our sales and catalog efforts to explain the technical merits of layered clothing for technology enthusiasts, and we succeeded with those products, the best-selling pieces were the least technical: Baggies beach shorts and Synchilla synchronized bombers. sports style jackets.

We begin to grow at a rapid pace; At one point we made Inc. Magazine's list of the fastest growing private companies. That rapid growth stopped in the summer of 1991, when our sales contracted during a recession and our bankers, themselves in trouble and for sale, applied for our revolving loan. To pay off the debt, we had to drastically reduce costs and dump the inventory. We have fired 20% of our workforce, many of them friends and friends of friends. And we almost lost our independence as a company. That taught us a great lesson. We have maintained growth and indebtedness on a modest scale since then.

Let my people surfee
We were able, in many ways, to keep our cultural values alive, even during the years of great growth, and after the impact of the 1991 layoffs. We were surrounded by friends who could dress as they liked, even barefoot. People ran or sailed at lunch, or played volleyball in the sandbox

Early environmental ethics of the company

Patagonia was still quite a small company when we began to dedicate time and money to the environmental crisis more and more evident. We all saw what was happening in the far corners of the world: the increasing pollution and deforestation, the slow and slow disappearance of fish and wildlife. And we saw what happened closer to home: Sequoias of a thousand years of age who succumbed to L.A. smog, the thinning of life in tidal pools and seaweed, the unbridled development of the land along the coast.

What we began to read - about global warming, the cutting and burning of tropical forests, the rapid loss of groundwater and soil, acid rain, the ruin of rivers and streams from dams - reinforced what we saw with our eyes and we smelled with our noses during our trips. At the same time, little by little we realized that the uphill battles waged by small and dedicated groups of people to save the habitat areas could produce significant results.

The first lesson came here at home, in the early '70s. A group of us attended a town hall meeting to help protect a local surf break. We vaguely knew that the Ventura River had once been an important habitat for silver salmon. Then, during the 1940s, two dams were built and the water was diverted. With the exception of winter rains, the only water left at the mouth of the river flowed from the wastewater plant. At that city council meeting, several experts testified that the river was dead and that channeling the mouth would have no effect on the remaining birds and wildlife, or on our rest to surf.

Things looked bleak until Mark Capelli, a 25-year-old biology student, gave a slide presentation of the photos he had taken along the river: the birds that lived in the willows, the muskrats and the snakes of water, the eels that the estuary. He even showed a slide of a steel harpy: yes, fifty or more steelhead still came to breed in our "dead" river.

The development plan was defeated. We gave Mark office space and a mailbox, and small contributions to help him fight in the battle of the river. As more development plans emerged, Friends of the Ventura River worked to defeat them, clean the water and increase its flow. Wildlife increased and more steelhead began to breed.

Mark taught us two important lessons: that a grassroots effort could make a difference, and that the degraded habitat could, with effort, be restored. Your work inspired us. We started making regular donations to stick to smaller groups that work to save or restore habitats instead of giving the money to NGOs with great staff, overhead and corporate connections. In 1986, we pledged to donate 10% of the profits each year to these groups. Subsequently, we increase the bet to 1% of sales, or 10% of profits, whichever is greater. We have maintained that commitment every year since then.

In 1988, we launched our first national environmental campaign on behalf of an alternative master plan to de-urbanize the Yosemite Valley. Every year since then, we have embarked on a great educational campaign on an environmental issue. We take an early position against the globalization of trade, where it means the commitment of environmental and labor standards. We have argued in favor of the removal of prey where the clogging, marginally useful prey compromises the life of the fish. We have supported wildland projects that seek to preserve entire ecosystems and create corridors for wildlife to roam. We celebrate, every eighteen months, a "Tools for activists" conference to teach marketing and publicity skills to some of the groups we work with.

Also, from the beginning, we started the initial steps to reduce our own role as a corporate polluter: we have been using recycled paper for our catalogs since the mid-1980s. We work with Malden Mills to develop recycled polyester for use in our Synchilla fleece.

Our distribution center in Reno, inaugurated in 1996, achieved a 60% reduction in the use of energy through solar tracking and radiant heating skylights; We use recycled content for everything from corrugated rods to carpets and partitions between urinals. We adapted the lighting systems in the existing stores, and the constructions for the new stores became increasingly green. We evaluate the dyes that we use and we eliminate the colors of the line that require the use of toxic metals and sulfides. The most important thing is that

Change to organic cotton

When we commissioned an independent environmental research company to evaluate four main fibers, we hoped to learn that oil-based polyester and nylon were major energy consumers and sources of pollution. And they proved it, but not on the cotton scale.

The "natural" fiber used in most of our sportswear proved to be, by far, the greatest environmental evil of the fibers studied. We learned that 25% of all toxic pesticides used in agriculture were used (and used) in growing cotton, that the contamination of the soil and the resulting water was (and is) horrible and that the evidence of damage to the health of workers in the strong field, although difficult to prove.

Cotton was the biggest villain, and he did not have to be. The farmers had grown cotton organically, without pesticides, for thousands of years. Only after World War II, chemists originally developed as nerve gases became available for commercial use, to eliminate the need to manually weed the fields.

We Experiment At the beginning we only manufacture shirts with organic cotton. Then, after several trips to the San Joaquin Valley, after having smelled the selenium ponds and seeing the lunar landscape of the cotton fields, we asked a critical question: How could we continue manufacturing products that in this way devastated the earth? ?

In the fall of 1994, we made the decision to wear our 100% organic cotton sportswear in 1996.

We had eighteen months to make the change of 66 products, and only four months to align the fabric. We discovered that there simply was not enough organic cotton commercially available to buy through intermediaries. We had to go directly to the few farmers who had returned to organic methods. And then we had to go to the ginners and centrifuges and convince them to clean their equipment after running what would be a very low amount for them. We had to talk to the certifiers so that all the fiber went back to the bale.

We were successful Each piece of Patagonia made of cotton in 1996 was organic, and it has been since then.

Next steps
We continue the search for fabrics that are more respectful with the environment. We are using more hemp, in some products in combination with recycled polyester. Recently, one of our suppliers has found a way to recycle polyester from sources other than soft drink bottles, and we are using the fabric in some of our best-selling products. More importantly, the clothes themselves can be recyclable. In the future, it should be possible for consumers to return a polyester-based jacket and then send it to a processor to be remanufactured in fiber or other forms of plastic.

Thirty years after the appearance of the Patagonia label, we continue to manufacture the best product. The pace of innovation during the last five years has been one of the most important. We have developed Capilene® basecoats that are mapped on the body or variable point, which, through careful construction, absorb moisture more efficiently and allow the user greater freedom of movement.

The Regulator® insulation Patagonia Women Down Sweater jackets represents a significant technical improvement over Synchilla. It is lighter, warmer, absorbs moisture more quickly and is much more compressible in a package. And it works in concert with a remarkable new generation of projectiles, hard, soft and hybrid, which are also lighter, more elastic and more elastic than any of their predecessors.

In fact, the fabrics have advanced so far, in the direction of the functional minimalism of St. Exupéry, that construction methods limited for a long time to the needle and the thread must now be brought up to date. For the spring of 2005, we are introducing new sewing methods for soft and hard shells that reduce volume, improve the fall and, what is more important, improve the performance in humid climates.

During the last thirty years, we have made many mistakes, but we never lost our way for a long time. Although we first thought of Patagonia as a way to free ourselves from the limitations of the original business of climbing, precisely those limitations have kept us alert and have helped us to prosper. We continue to practice climbing and surfing, activities that involve risks, require soul and invite reflection. In our expansion project you can find countless official Patagonia store all over the world. We prefer informal trips with friends, doing what we like to do, to the event covered by the camera. We can not induce ourselves to make a mediocre product knowingly. And we can not take our eyes off the damage we all do in our one home.