Yvon Chouinard

Vincent Stanley

Details the business policies undertaken by the outdoor sports clothing company Patagonia to make environmentally responsible practices a priority, including using organic cotton and manufacturing recycled fleece.

The Responsible Company

Now includes the company's last ten years of action and innovation and an explanation of Patagonia's revolutionary new business organization: The Patagonia Purpose Trust and The Holdfast Collective Simple but powerful advice on how and why to rethink your business structure in a time when traditional capitalism is no longer working for people or the planet. Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia, and Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's Director of Philosophy, draw on 50 years' experience at Patagonia to challenge all business owners and leaders to rethink their businesses in a time of cultural and climate chaos. Patagonia over and over throughout the years has been recognized as much for its ground-breaking environmental, social practices as for the quality of its clothes. And then, in an unprecedented action, in 2022, the Chouinard family gave their company away, converting ownership to a simple structure of trusts and non-profits, so that all the profits from the company can be used to protect our home planet and work to reverse climate chaos. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately challenge other companies, as big as Wal-Mart and as small as the corner bakery, to do the same. In plain, compelling prose, the authors describe the current impact of manufacturing, commerce, and traditional capitalism on the planet's natural systems and human communities, and how that impact is forcing business to change its ways. The Future of the Responsible Company shows companies how to reduce the harm they cause, improve the quality of their business, and provide the kind of meaningful work everyone seeks. It concludes with specific, practical steps every business can undertake, as well as advice on what to do, in what order. This is the first book to show companies how to thread their way through economic sea change and slow the drift toward ecological bankruptcy. Its advice is simple but powerful: reduce your environmental footprint (and its skyrocketing cost), make legitimate products that last, reclaim deep knowledge of your business and its supply chain to make the most of opportunities in the years to come, and earn the trust you'll need by treating your workers, customers and communities with respect. This updated edition also describes the threats of traditional capitalism and why the owners of Patagonia chose to hack the system to ensure that the company will still exist and have impact in 100 years.

What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 50 Years

The Responsbile Company

Including Let My People Go Surfing / the Responsible Company / and Patagonia's Tools for Grassroots Activists

The Patagonia Business Library

Douglas Chadwick

Gerry Lopez

A sampling of titles available from Patagonia Books. Patagonia Books is intended as a way to advance our love of books as well as nature and a reflective life. We publish a select number of titles on wilderness, wildlife, and outdoor sports that inspire and restore connection to the natural world. We also present books that raise awareness about not only the environmental challenges our world faces, but suggest ways that we can work together to slow the disintegration of our planet. This includes immediate activities, such as strategies to reduce our carbon footprint, as well as more in-depth examinations of the meanings of affluence, consumerism, and capitalism in the 21st Century.

Vincent Stanley

Books

Your next favorite book is out there