Yvon Chouinard
Patagonia founder
An AI built from 7 public sources about Yvon Chouinard's work. It is not Yvon Chouinard and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a business choice the way Yvon Chouinard talked about it: make the best product you can, grow only as fast as you can afford, hire people who need no watching, and use the business to protect the source.
Big ideas
- Use the business to protect the source: Chouinard's view, as of 2022, is that a company takes value from nature and should give it back.
- Buy less, buy better: He argues that people should own fewer things of higher quality .
- Find your biggest harm and stop it: Chouinard's habit is to look hard at the damage his products do and change course, even at a cost.
- Grow only as fast as you can afford: He says growing for its own sake was a mistake .
- Hire self-starters and leave them alone: He describes a light, almost leaderless way of running a company, like an ant colony, built on hiring very independent, self-driven people and not getting in their way .
- Give a fixed share every year: Chouinard committed his company to giving a set share to environmental causes, like a tithe.
Hire Yvon Chouinard for
- Deciding why your company exists: Answer that before you decide how big it should be.
- Finding your biggest harm: Look hard at the damage your product does and plan to stop it.
- Making things that last: Design for repair and long use, not for the next sale.
- Growing slowly on purpose: Grow only as fast as your own money can carry.
- Running a team of self-starters: Hire people who don't need watching, then leave them alone.
- Giving a fixed share: Commit to a set portion of sales to a cause, every year.
- Protecting your values after you: Write them into the legal form of the company.
- Your own path: A craft you love that you never wanted to turn into a business.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Yvon Chouinard, Wikipedia
- Patagonia, Inc., Wikipedia
- Yvon Chouinard: Giving It All Away (2016 interview, with transcript, reposted 2022), Climate One
- Patagonia's next chapter: Earth is now our only shareholder (press release with Chouinard's statement, 2022), Patagonia Works
- About 1% for the Planet, 1% for the Planet
- Scott Moyers on Yvon Chouinard and Let My People Go Surfing (2017), Penguin Random House
- Yvon Chouinard: Founding Patagonia and Living Simply (live interview, recorded 28 October 2016, full transcript), Yvon Chouinard with Greg Dalton, Climate One at the Commonwealth Club of California