Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Chouinard claims Patagonia was the first to apply the industrial design principal that function dictates form to clothing. This means that every piece of clothing they make must serve a purpose. For example, long underwear must dry quickly and wick moisture away from the skin to keep the body warm. Only after the designers establish use do they decide on things like fabric and color.

Mountain climbers take as little gear as is safe because they have to carry it up a mountain. Chouinard and Patagonia view multifunctionality as a philosophical and environmental consideration: It’s better to buy one product that does the job of many than many that are uni-functional. A rain jacket that can be used for climbing, for skiing, and in the city has a smaller environmental footprint than three separate jackets. However, to maintain credibility in certain fields (surfing, fly-fishing, skiing), Patagonia makes sport-specific products to honor brand-loyal core customers.

A product is only as durable as its weakest element, so Patagonia designs its clothes so that every element wears out around the same time. It does this through extensive wear testing in the field and lab.

Products can only be durable to a point, so Patagonia makes its products easily repairable. The team performs repairs for a small fee and makes how-to videos for at-home repairs. They believe that caring for and repairing a product gives one a sense of responsibility and ownership for that belonging. This owner is different from the consumer, who merely buys and disposes of products, in that they care for their possessions.

Determining sizing for clothes is impossible—the chosen system will never work for everyone. Nevertheless, Patagonia tries to cater to everyone with its three size blocks of slim fit, regular, and relaxed. The slim style of clothes fits lean climbers, for example, whereas the relaxed style fits bulkier hunters. The company makes fit consistent through its lines and preshrinks everything. Designers also consider whether a product will be worn over or under other things in determining fit.

Patagonia adheres to a minimalist design philosophy that Chouinard sums up in the words of Dieter Rams, the head of design at Braun: “Good design is as little design as possible” (205). New fabrics allow Patagonia’s designers to eliminate more and more elements of their clothes: More breathable fabric renders pit zips unnecessary; watertight zippers render protective wind flaps obsolete.

A smaller product line is more profitable than one with a vast array of products in a multitude of colors. Such a line means more design time and increased production and warehouse costs. Moreover, too much choice is overwhelming and can make people unhappy. Patagonia lets function limit the number of products in its line.

Innovation is more feasible that invention because the latter takes too much time and money and is too rare. Patagonia relies on innovation—the tweaking of an existing idea—in designing products. Designers look to other types of clothing for inspiration. For example, Chouinard got the idea for bunting fleece from his friend’s brushed wool Fila pullover. This inspiration led to the development of Patagonia’s trademark Synchilla and microfleeces, all of which can be washed, unlike the Fila pullover.

There’s a difference between a company that sells the same products abroad as it does at home and one that tailors its international product lines to local markets. Chouinard defines the first as an international company and the latter as a global one. He won’t consider Patagonia a global company until it can change its designs to fit regional preferences and produces more locally than centrally. Thinking in this global way will stimulate innovation.

In trying to mitigate its environmental impact, Patagonia studied the impact of clothing throughout its lifecycle and found that most of that impact comes after manufacture: “We found that the postsale care of a clothing product caused as much as four times the amount of harm as the entire manufacturing process” (211). Since caring for a product also takes time, none of Patagonia’s products require special care.

Patagonia accepts returns from people who aren’t satisfied with their products.

Products that look like something must have the function people expect from that thing. Patagonia doesn’t make facsimiles of things as is often seen in the fashion world; they only make the real deal. For example, a hunter’s field coat should have a rear game pocket lined to repel blood.

Patagonia privileges its core customers over its other customers. It designs for veteran, often professional outdoors people because those are the people who use the products for their intended function.

Beauty is timeless, whereas fashion is transitory. Beauty in a finished product is also an indication of good design. Chouinard quotes Richard Buckminster Fuller: “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong” (218). Using beauty as an indicator of quality reminds designers to avoid following fashion trends.

Patagonia investigates its supply chain to determine the environmental impact of its clothes. For example, in 1988 the company learned that the cotton it used contained formaldehyde and other toxins used to prevent shrinkage and wrinkling. Subsequently, after learning of the outsize environmental impact conventionally farmed cotton has, it switched to organic cotton. The team hoped the line would be successful so that other companies would try organic cotton. They learned that while people generally don’t buy something because it is natural, that natural quality does add value to the product.

Sometimes Patagonia works with a provider to change a source material for the better. It worked with a wool provider in Patagonia to reduce the environmental impact of the sheep, restore past damage, and reduce the amount of chemicals used in the milling process. Patagonia also partnered with a company to develop a biodegradable yet still fully functional alternative to neoprene (which has a big environmental footprint) for its wetsuits, creating a viable material from guayule, a desert shrub.

Additionally, Patagonia found that many of the dyes it used were toxic and, as of the republication of this book in 2016, was working to find good alternatives to the toxic ones.