How this Legendary Climber Started a Billion-Dollar Company
This is the story of Yvon Chouinard’s first 21 years with Patagonia
I can’t tell you what I love about Patagonia but something just feels right.
There’s a nice upwelling of pride when you have their brand on your chest, and there’s a familiar camaraderie that comes when you see someone wearing the same.
So I couldn’t help but wonder what makes the American outdoor retailer so special and how I could imitate their success as a small business owner.
My research starts in 1952 when founder Yvon Chouinard realized his love for climbing with The Falconry Club and continues until 1973 when Patagonia is officially born. An unimaginable 21 years.
01 Climber
As a French-Canadian immigrant, Yvon spent much of his early life alone. He struggled to speak English and spent all his free time baiting fish or hunting frogs.
So you could say his life only truly began when he discovered the Southern California Falconry Club at the age of 14. Here, under the tutelage of older falconers, weekend outings in search of hawks’ nests led to an obsession with climbing.
Adventures spread beyond club events as he and his buddies found their means (by hopping freight trains and stealing rope from the phone company) to practice their speed descents.
By the summer he turned sixteen, he was already doing solo ascents of unclimbed routes of Gannett Peak, the tallest mountain in Wyoming.
Later, the Patagonia founder would recall, “Every one of those friends of mine… [we] never wanted to work, we never wanted to become stable citizens. All we wanted was to climb, forever. It was as valid a life as anything we could think of.”
Yvon’s passion for climbing was obsessive.
02 Craftsman
But there was a problem.
Coming from a family of limited means (Yvon’s father was known to pull out his teeth with pliers to save on dentures), Yvon simply couldn’t afford the expensive and unremovable pitons from Europe that dominated the market.
So, in typical Chouinard fashion (Yvon’s father was also known to build an entire house himself from electricity to plumbing), Yvon went to a junkyard, bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs and hammers, then taught himself how to blacksmith.
Yvon emerged with chrome-molybdenum steel pitons that he tested successfully on early ascents of the Lost Arrow Chimney and the north face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite. Word spread and soon his pitons were all his friends wanted to have.
And I’m sure his father would have been proud. “Because I inherited some of these genes,” Chouinard wrote years later, “I have a preference for learning and doing things on my own.”
03 Tradesman
His pitons, however, were hardly a source of fortune. An hour’s worth of work would give him two pitons that he would sell for only $1.50 each.
But what this brought Yvon was freedom. Because most of his tools were portable, he could load up his car and travel the California coast from Big Sur to San Diego.
I’m sure that would have been more than enough for Yvon but demand soon exceeded the two pitons he could make per hour. He borrowed $825 from his parents, built a drop forging die, and began mass-producing his pitons that were superior to anything else available then.
He emerged in 1965 with his first mail-order catalog and a partnership with Tom Frost. Under the name of Chouinard Equipment, the pair would work together for 9 more years redesigning every climbing tool they got their hands on making each stronger, lighter, and more functional.
This time was guided by a design principle inspired by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, the French aviator: “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
04 Retailer
Despite his financial success, Yvon never closed the door to adventure and never stopped doing things himself.
In 1971, during a climbing trip in England with his wife Malinda Pennoyer, Yvon came across a mill that made vintage corduroy, which he fashioned into heavy-duty shorts and knickers.
Later, in Scotland, Yvon realized the toughness of regulation-team rugby shirts was just as value-adding for climbers as its collar which kept hardware slings from cutting into the skin.
And so born from the practicalities of adventure were polyurethane rain cagoules and bivouac sacks from Scotland, boiled-wool gloves and mittens from Austria, hand-knit reversible beanies from Boulder (no two were alike), and synthetic pile sweaters from North Atlantic fishermen.
Initially, these soft goods were sold alongside the metalworks of Chouinard Equipment. But in 1973, as sales of the former quickly outpaced that of the latter, Yvon decided to create Patagonia.
Named after his Fun Hogs trip in 1968 with Doug Tompkins, who at the time had just started an outdoor-gear retailer called the North Face and a small clothing company called Esprit, Patagonia is a symbolism of the adventures that were Yvon’s constant source of inspiration and innovation.
05 Environmentalist
More importantly, his adventures allowed him to stay in touch with his passion, his customers, and the planet.
Paired with the founding of Patagonia in 1973 was a challenge: “As we enter this new era of mountaineering, reexamine your motives for climbing. Employ restraint and good judgment. Remember the rock, the other climbers — climb clean.”
This challenge was posed as much to himself and his company as his customers and climbers worldwide.
Yvon turned his attention inward as he notice his gear, especially the repeated hammering of pitons during placement and removal, was severely damaging the rocks.
It was from this context that Yvon and Patagonia made their first major business decision on behalf of the environment. They stopped the production of their most important and lucrative product, the pitons, and in its place introduced aluminum chocks proven not to harm the rock. It is now touted as a huge milestone and success for the company, but ask yourself how many companies would do the same and you would realize the gravity of the risk taken.
06 Climber
When he was a kid, Yvon dreamed of becoming a fur trapper like his French-Canadian ancestors. So, you can imagine that when this young boy fell in love with climbing and decided to make his pitons it was for no other reason than he could.
There was no dream of becoming a business mogul or of revolutionizing corporate America.
The Patagonia name resonates with customers all over the world not just because of their commitment to quality and their responsibility to their environment, but also (and probably more importantly) because of the longstanding philosophy that dominates its every action: what’s important isn’t what you accomplished, it’s how you got there.
For Yvon Chouinard, it’s always just been about his search for the Perfect Moment: the flash of “lucidity, focus, and emptiness,” the psychic intensity that hardship brings.
His longtime fishing companion Tom McGuane explains it like this: “Whenever he gets comfortable, he gets suspicious of everything, and he sort of smells a rat. We have a camp on the Dean River [in British Columbia] where we have warm beds and where somebody cooks for us, and I know that bothers him.” McGuane adds: “He always wants to do things the hard way.”
In this lens it starts to make complete sense for a French-Canadian nobody to teach himself blacksmithing, to stop selling the pitons that put him in business, to enter the retail industry with no experience, to fight for clean climbing, and to emerge with a company worth one billion dollars.
If you want to learn more about Patagonia’s unusual post-1973 growth into the billion-dollar behemoth, then I’m sure you would enjoy reading Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing.
Here’s an excerpt that I just love:
“When you get away from the idea that a company is a product to be sold to the highest bidder in the shortest amount of time, all future decisions in the company are affected. The owners and the officers see that since the company will outlive them, they have responsibilities beyond the bottom line. Perhaps they will even see themselves as stewards, protectors of the corporate culture, the assets, and of course the employees.”
🧗🏻 This piece was inspired by podcast episodes from Armchair Explorer and How I Built This then supported by articles and interviews from Surfer Today, The New Yorker, Men’s Journal, Topia, Patagonia, and Case Western University School of Law.
💡 I would like to thank KT, Lance, Max, Johann, and Joanne for all the time and energy invested in reading this piece. Their feedback contributed to improvements I could not have made on my own.
🚀 If you have some room and enjoyed this piece, I would love to have you as a follower on Medium!
