This reminds me of Bosch. The majority of the company is owned by the Robert Bosch Stiftung [1] which gets the most of the profit (after reinvestments into the company) to fund educational projects in the sense of Robert Bosch. In my opinion it's a nice concept to use the profits for things that benefit us. There are still other people in charge of advisories but they don't profit from it.
Let us hope that more companies follow the path of Bosch and Patagonia.
Chouinard is one classy dude. It's a shame that the US legal system ruined his climbing company. I still have a sentimental old ice harness with the proper diamond logo. It inspires me to see him still doing things his way.
Rock climbing has a history as a technical part of Alpinism. Over time, some people started to enjoy rock climbing more as a sport, and as an end unto itself, instead of just a sub-skill contributing to mountain ascents. Early 20c rock climbing started to break from the traditional siege mountaineering techniques: fixed ropes, jumars, hammered pins, hooks, etriers, nailed boots, etc. Post war, the availability of nylon, aluminium, chrome-steel, and synthetic rubber opened up the possibilities. Modern big-wall, ice, and clean rock styles developed. Chouinard was part of all these scenes, and big proponent of style. He made equipment, put up hard routes, and evangelized. He was one of many founders of modern "clean" style, using dynamic ropes and clean pro, leaving "nothing but footprints.
Many early climbers made their own gear, or bought from a climber who did. But Chouinard (with Tom Frost) really got into it, and improved or invented a bunch of things (e.g. Hexcentrics, the modern ice axe, and then camalots!) that made clean climbing possible and safe(er). Chouinard equipment was from the future.
But then the 80's happened, and the diy hippie scene gave way to the lawyers. Some people (novices, window washers, and other untrained people) died when they failed to secure their harness and fell, and the lawsuits looked likely to sink them. You'll notice the colour warnings and liability label around the double-back buckle these days -- that's from these suits. But, ever classy, he declared bankruptcy, sold the hard assets to the employees, and walked away. The logo and his name was consumed by the lawsuits, so the new Black Diamond logo was born. This image[0] shows two Chouinard logos, and then the BD logo. My old harness has the left logo, and I still have an old fimo earring I made to match. No offence meant to the BD people, but their logo will always be wrong to my eye.
The wiki does an ok job with the basics[1], but it doesn't catch the mood of it. I started climbing in the 80s, coming up in the Yosemite school. We were absolutely scandalized that someone could try and sue when climbing went wrong -- especially for mis-use of the gear. Self-authority was central to the scene. Smarter people than me also knew there would be all sorts of secondary problems, and the battles over access in the next decades often had liability concerns at their core. It was the end of an era.
Honestly never was interested in Patagonia (associated them with Silicon Valley bro types). After learning about the company and its owner from the move they made yesterday I'll probably refresh my wardrobe with some of their products for the coming winter.
And the reason the bros like it is because it's legitimately good quality and it looks good. You can wear it on the slopes and keep it on at après-ski, so to speak.
Also, my personal endorsement: I love my Patagonia fleece vest. I got mine used on Ebay 7 years ago and it has held up that long.
It's really funny how much of a stereotype it was. I've heard it being referred to as Patagucci, and there was even a puffy vest vending machine in sfo for a year or so (uniqlo, not patagonia)
So you don't need actual product, just their idea. That is pure consumerism. I do recommend documentary series Century of Self (2002, BBC) from Alex Curtis that explain how it works.
Not really, most of the “bros” I knew when I worked in SV I would describe as white or Indian men moderately interested in hiking biking and camping. Which makes sense, the Bay Area is stunning. Grab a beer or two afterwards. Have a nice time. (You might detect I’m kinda on the side of the bros here.)
I'm curious what they're going to do, long term, about their use of PFAS (the alleged forever chemicals) in waterproofing. Apparently they've been trying to reduce usage or find alternatives, but the alternatives aren't demonstrably better.
I wish they'd use less plastic. It's hard to find anything from Patagonia that uses environmentally-friendly materials.
Perhaps they can research a way to make performance fabrics that are better for the earth.
Allbirds has been a real pioneer in this space, and they've shown that you can use natural, sustainable materials and produce a product just as good as the others.
Robustly Post-capitalist Desire (shadow title: Capitalist Realism), a Mark Fisher (author of well known k-punk blog, Exiting the Vampire Castle, & many more) lecture series that he suicided during part-way through. Accepts capitalism as utterly unavoidable, as something we have to keep working through, & find objectives through, and tries to imagine what desire & goals might look like in a world that is defined almost exclusively by making more money (slash paperclips), where the invisible hand runs on auto-pilot towards it's own ends.
Post-capitalist Desire is now a book with the 5 surviving lectures, and the reading list for the planned course.
We've now got like 1/2755 billionaires actually putting up some kind of resistance to the cyclically consumptive desires of capital. Great.
Would you rather they not make this move? Comments like yours are unnecessarily exhausting. Are they perfect? No. If your standard is to criticize and tear down anyone doing anything less than perfect than you won’t ever be happy. Compared to almost everyone in this industry, this is a major move. How about we applaud it and hope others do the same rather than approach everything with a jaded eye because it doesn’t meet some impossible standard?
I'm calling a spade a spade. It's a huge PR move that aligns with the brand identity.
The (former) shareholders will continue to lead luxurious lives. Patagonia will continue to contribute to wasteful fashion and the global oversupply of clothing products.
If any net-good is caused by this PR campaign, I will consider it a coincidence.
Patagonia’s pricing and quality can hardly be considered fast fashion! If you think it is contributing to the global oversupply of clothing the what do you propose instead? No clothing unless it is $1000/item and lasts forever?
I think you need to reevaluate whether it is truly a spade you are calling a spade or whether your feelings about an entire industry lead you to denigrate every actor, including those imperfect actors who actually show leadership in the industry. Again, what standard do you need to see met in order to be satisfied?
> Patagonia will continue to contribute to fast-fashion...
OK, this is just wrong.
"Fast fashion" has a meaning -- it's about duplicating high fashion or celebrity fashion cheaply and quickly and mass-marketing it with a lot of turnover.
That's not what Patagonia is doing, either by its actions or by its advertising. They have sold a line of fleeces, baggy surf shorts, and rain shells for decades now. The designs improve and refine and slowly morph, but they are largely the same.
These items have long life (both as durable clothing articles, and as purchasable items in the catalog) and aren't really mimicking runway/celebrity trends at all. They are the opposite of fast fashion, along several axes. A significant part of their website is devoted to promoting older clothes, and selling used clothes, e.g. https://www.patagonia.com/stories/worn-wear/, and https://www.patagonia.com/stories/dont-buy-this-jacket-black... .
It's a demonstrable fact that Carbon Dioxide as a % of the Earth's atmosphere is increasing, and virtually all serious models predict that it will have a significant impact on the planet's average temperature and other characteristics.
But there's a big prisoner's dilemma emerging over it, especially as globalism appears to be breaking down between the West and Russia/China. When trade and diplomacy erode to the point of a cold war between the two factions, there's nothing that can be used as leverage to prevent the other parties from cheating on climate agreements.
The West can try to tackle climate change in its own countries, but if the actions it takes puts them at a economic/military disadvantage to Russia/China, then it might do far more harm to the future of a free, non-totalitarian world than climate change could.
The way scientists are hunting down methane leaks and CFC cheaters using satellites gives me hope. Even in the cold war, there were nuclear test bans enforced using monitoring technology.
The fact that we need satellites, whose manufacturing, launches, and operation produce insane amounts of GHGs, is disheartening and doesn't really justify the earth-sensing industry. Audits and enforcement can be achieved without satellites.
De-globalization will slow down economy, human activities, resulting in less pollution, less production. As long as there are no world wars, or any war for that matter, I'm all for de-globalization.
You might not have a problem with your phone costing $2000 dollars in that case, but there's so much machinery, equipment, chips, materials and various other products that would massively increase in cost or simply couldn't be produced anywhere else.
How would that affect healthcare, education, manufacturing, whatever? I'm guessing that the amount of avoidable deaths that would be caused just because you can't get a chip that you need for a medical diagnostic device would soon be rivaling potential climate change deaths.
Climate change needs to be tackled and globalization isn't my favorite thing in the world, but I don't think this is the right way.
"De-growth" should be understood to mean we will have to give up some things in the name of the greater good.
Yours is quite a common argument, but ultimately it is justified by a sense of entitlement of having the technology that is now assumed to be necessary and inevitable. The reality is that we as a civilization have jumped too far, too fast, we don't actually need those things to survive, and we will need to be comfortable temporarily sacrificing certain luxuries to attain a long-lasting sustainable path forward.
> we as a civilization have jumped too far, too fast, we don't actually need those things to survive, and we will need to be comfortable temporarily sacrificing certain luxuries
If you mean the average hacker news reader, you may be right. If you're talking about the average person on this planet, you're very far off. The type of global reform that makes a high earning tech worker's smart phone double in price will also have millions of people pushed back into poverty or outright starvation. The hypothetical political, economical or technological tools for reducing luxury consumption while at the same time having no net effect on survivability for the global poor, are entirely imaginary. You can say that we went too far when we discovered artificial fertilizer, which allowed the planet to support 2x its human population, but it's a bit late to put that genie back in the bottle now.
That said, doing nothing is a pretty good recipe for displacing and starving people as well, we just have much less information on exactly how and when that disaster will manifest itself.
> The type of global reform that makes a high earning tech worker's smart phone double in price will also have millions of people pushed back into poverty or outright starvation.
I don't see any reason to believe this, nor any justification of that statement in the rest of your comment. Is it really so hard to believe that some of those at the top can lose a little bit of luxury, and the rest of the world can gain access to progressive economics, at the same time?
> it's a bit late to put that genie back in the bottle now
If we don't, the physical principle of conservation of mass will do it for us. We are demonstrably running out of the materials we need to continue down this path, both specifically with respect to artificial fertilizer as well as more generally with the finite resources available within reach given current and near-future technologies. Which approach do you think will cause less suffering: preparing for a dearth of resources that we can see coming before it happens, or waiting until people are dying of starvation en masse to start thinking about it?
Machinery, materials, medicines that save lives aren't luxuries and I don't think you can argue that needlesly letting a lot of people die is in any way a greater good.
Maybe dialing it back 10% and not 100% cold turkey?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32842357