The ultimate act of living your brand values and using business for good: Patagonia’s future
If the model doesn’t exist, you can create your own.
That’s what Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard did, when looking to exit his $3 Billion business.
Selling the company and donating all the profits would help, but in no way guarantee, the survival of Patagonia’s values. Taking the company public was never an option for him either, because of investor pressures to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term responsibility.
For a company whose brand is being “in business to save our home planet”, they are staying true to their values.
Here’s how, and why, the founder is doing his part for the world as a business leader:
“It’s been a half-century since we began our experiment in responsible business. If we have any hope of a thriving planet 50 years from now, it demands all of us doing all we can with the resources we have. As the business leader I never wanted to be, I am doing my part. Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth, we are using the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source. We’re making Earth our only shareholder. I am dead serious about saving this planet.”
The announcement was all over business media and made its rounds LinkedIn, for good reason.
This illustration shows the new structure they have created:
Instead of selling the company or taking it public (and using the funds to do good personally), founder Chouinard and his family transferred their ownership of Patagonia to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization.
The new entitites shown in the illustration above were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits (around $100 million a year) are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.
